The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  Finally it was six p.m., and I could get on my down coat, my hat, my scarf, my gloves—all the layers one needs against a Canadian winter—and abandon ship for the night.

  It was a cold night—the mercury in the minus teens, with snow beginning to cascade down. There were two films playing at the Uptown which I wanted to see. It was a twenty-minute walk down 8th Avenue from the library, and I figured I could time it to stop in a wine bar called Escoba a few doors down from the cinema and have a plate of pasta and several glasses of something red and hearty, then duck into the cinema and kill the evening staring at projected shadows in a darkened room. But as soon as I walked out of the library, I did something rather strange. I sat down on the pavement outside its main entrance and just remained there, oblivious to the cold, the snow, the passersby who glanced at me as if I were mad . . . which, perhaps, I was.

  A cop came by—a middle-aged man wearing a furry hat with ear flaps, the badge of the Calgary police pinned across its front.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  I didn’t look up at him, but turned and stared into the gutter.

  He crouched down beside me.

  “Ma’am, I asked you a question. Are you all right?”

  “I’ll never be all right,” I heard myself saying.

  “Ma’am, have you had an accident? Are you hurt?”

  “I did this last year.”

  “Did what, ma’am?”

  “The night after my daughter died, I sat down in the street.”

  “I’m not following this . . .”

  “I went back to where the accident happened and I sat down in the street, and I couldn’t get up again until the police came and . . .”

  “Ma’am, I need to know your name, please?”

  I turned away. I felt his gloved hand on my shoulder.

  “Ma’am, do you have any identification on you?”

  I still refused to look at him.

  “OK, ma’am. I’m calling for back-up and getting you somewhere safe for the night.”

  But as I heard him reach for his walkie-talkie, a man came hurrying over.

  “I know her,” he told the officer.

  I glanced up and saw Vern Byrne. He crouched down by me.

  “Did something happen, Jane?”

  “A year ago . . .”

  “I know, I know,” he said quietly.

  “How do you know this woman?” the cop asked.

  “We work together.”

  “Is she always like this?”

  Vern tapped him on the shoulder. They both stood up and spoke in low voices for a few moments. Then the cop crouched down again beside me and said: “Your colleague has assured me he’s going to get you home. He told me what you said about your daughter is true. And that’s really hard—and I’m sorry for you. But this is my beat—and if I find you again in the street like this I am going to have to get you admitted to the psych wing at Foothills Hospital . . . and, believe me, that would give me no pleasure.”

  “This won’t happen again,” Vern said.

  “All right,” the cop said, “but you promise you will get her home?”

  “You have my word.”

  The cop left. Vern helped me to my feet, putting a protective and steadying arm around me.

  “Let’s get you home,” he said.

  “I’m not going home.”

  “You’ve got to go home. You heard what the officer said.”

  “I am not going home.”

  My body stiffened. I was suddenly determined to be immobile.

  “Please, Jane,” he whispered. “If the officer comes back and finds us still here . . .”

  “A drink,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Buy me a drink.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  VERN HUSTLED ME into the first bar he could find. It was located diagonally across the road from the Central Public Library. The wind was scalpel sharp and the blowing snow made visibility difficult. Vern grasped my left arm with the force of a lifeguard pulling a half-drowned swimmer out of deep water. We all but fell into the bar.

  “Jeez,” Vern said under his breath as he looked around. “Kind of fancy.”

  The bar was actually a restaurant called Julliard. There were booths. Vern steered me into one. A waitress approached us, all smiles.

  “You guys look like you need some antifreeze! So what’s it going to be?”

  “What’s your pleasure?” Vern asked me.

  I just shrugged.

  “You like rye?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Two Crown Royals, straight up, water back,” he told the waitress.

  When she was out of earshot he leaned over and asked: “You OK now?”

  “Thank you for getting me here.”

  The drinks arrived. I picked up the glass and downed the rye in one go. It didn’t burn the way so many whiskeys do when they hit the esophagus. It had a slight sweetness and a hint of honey that was immediately warming. I put the glass down and turned to the waitress who still hadn’t removed our glasses of water from her tray.

  “Could I have another, please?”

  “No problem,” she said, then added: “You sure as heck must have been cold.”

  “Know what I can’t stand about Canada?” I suddenly said to Vern. “All the goddamn politeness—and the way everyone uses namby-pamby language. Heck . . . jeez . . . sugar . . . freaking. Can’t you people swear in this country? Do you all have to be so inanely polite? Know what I think? You all sit on your hands so much you can’t come out swinging. I mean, they broadcast all that politically correct Inuit Throat Singing shit on the CBC . . . and you don’t fucking object. Not ‘freaking’ object. Fucking object. That’s right, fuck. I’m from South of the Border and I say fuck . . .”

  This rant was delivered in a very loud voice. It silenced everyone around us. All eyes were upon me. Before I knew what was happening, Vern was throwing some money on the table and hustling me out the door. Again he steered me by the arm as we hit the cold. He said nothing, but the lifeguard grip had become that of a cop making an arrest. We turned left up 8th Avenue.

  “There’s always a taxi outside the Palliser,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “I messed up in there. I . . .”

  “Stop, please,” he said, the tone more worried than angry.

  “All right, all right. Just get me home and . . .”

  “I don’t think you should be left alone.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “That’s not my reading of the situation.”

  “I can handle things.”

  Vern said nothing. He just gripped me tighter and pushed me forward. The wind was now cruel, grating any exposed skin. We made it to the Palliser in five minutes, by which point my fingers had so stiffened that it pained me to bend them. There were three cabs outside the hotel. Vern bundled us into one of them and gave the driver an address on 29th Street NW.

  “I live just off 17th Avenue SW,” I said.

  “We’re not going there.”

  “You hijacking me?” I asked.

  Vern said nothing, but leaned over and locked the door beside me.

  “Trust me: I’m not going to jump out of a moving vehicle,” I said.

  “I did once.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “Why?”

  He stared down at his hands and spoke slowly.

  “My daughter had just been committed. More to the point, I had signed the papers committing her. After that I went on a seven-day bender. It ended with me jumping out of a moving car. I was hospitalized for three weeks. I broke my left leg. I cracked three ribs. I fractured my jaw. They also put me in a psych ward. I ended up losing my job. It was awful—and I’d rather not see you go through something like that.”

  “I’ve done the psych ward already.”

  He registered t
hat with a quiet nod—and we said nothing until we reached 29th Street NW. The cab pulled up in front of a modest split-level bungalow. Vern paid the driver and got me inside. As we crossed the threshold he hit a light. We were in a hallway—and one that looked like it was last decorated in 1965. There was faded brown floral wallpaper, an old antique coat rack, a side table covered with two lace doilies. (Does anyone still use doilies?) He took my coat and hung it up and told me to make myself at home in the front room.

  “You want to stay with rye?” he asked.

  “Rye works,” I said.

  The front room was decorated with the same wallpaper and had heavy mahogany-toned furniture similar to the coatrack and the table in the hallway. Again lace covered the headrests on the oversized armchair and the sofa. There was a venerable baby grand piano covered with sheet music and a pair of Tiffany lamps on two end tables. But most conspicuous were the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, all heaving with music texts and thousands of CDs. The CDs were all alphabetized, with little dividers noting major composers. There was also a serious stereo system covering two shelves and two large floor-standing speakers.

  Vern came in carrying a tray, on which stood two crystal whiskey glasses, a bottle of Crown Royal, an ice bucket, and a small water pitcher. He set the tray down on the coffee table.

  “This room is amazing,” I said.

  “Always strikes me as rather ordinary.”

  “But the CD collection. There must be over a thousand disks here.”

  “Around eleven hundred,” he said. “The rest are in the basement.”

  “You have more?”

  “Yes. A few.”

  “Can I see?”

  Vern shrugged, then pointed his thumb toward a doorway off the living room. He opened it, flipped a switch, and I followed him down a narrow set of stairs into . . .

  What I saw completely threw me. Because there, in this completely finished basement, was shelf after shelf of CDs, again meticulously organized in library style, with a high-end stereo system connected to two massive speakers. One oversized leather armchair faced these speakers. There was also a large trestle table and a high-back swivel chair, strewn across which were papers, books, a laptop computer—and behind which was a shelf on which rested the entire Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The basement felt like both a serious musicological shrine and something of a command center. If Dr. Strangelove had been a classical music fiend he would have felt most at home in this subterranean cavern.

  “Good God,” I said. “It’s extraordinary.”

  “Uhm . . . thanks,” Vern said.

  “Did you buy all the CDs?”

  “Uhm . . . around a quarter of them. The rest . . . well, ever heard of the British magazine Gramophone? Or Stereo Review in the States? I’ve been reviewing for both of them for around fifteen years.”

  “And this is where you write your reviews?”

  “Yes . . . and also work on . . .”

  Again he broke off, not sure if he wanted to share another piece of information with me.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I’m writing a textbook.”

  “But that’s fantastic. Is it commissioned?”

  He nodded.

  “Who’s the publisher?”

  “McGraw-Hill.”

  “The biggest textbook publisher in the States. I presume it’s a music textbook?”

  “It’s sort of like the Oxford Dictionary of Music—but aimed at high-school students. Potted histories of major composers from Hildegard of Bingen right up to Philip Glass.”

  “How did you land such an amazing gig?”

  “I wrote them a long letter, explaining my background, my teaching experience, my degrees, my writings for various magazines—and also included a pretty extensive outline. Never expected to hear anything from them but, out of the blue, I got this call from an editor there named Campbell Hart. Asked me if I would come to New York to meet him. Even offered me a plane ticket and a hotel room for one night if I’d make the trip. Hadn’t been in New York since . . . Jeez, since I was a university student back in the late sixties.”

  “Where did you go to university?”

  “Toronto—and the Royal College of Music in London. But that was a long time ago.”

  Now it was my turn to look at him carefully to see if he was being on the level with me.

  “What were you studying at the Royal College?”

  “Piano.”

  “You were accepted there as a pianist?”

  “It’s ancient history.”

  “But . . . the Royal College of Music in London. You must have been some pianist.”

  “Let’s go back upstairs,” he said.

  He started turning off all the lights, then escorted me back into the living room.

  “You ready for that rye?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  “You want water back or some ice?”

  “No—I’ll take it neat.”

  As he poured out two fingers for me I noticed just the slightest tremble in his hands. He handed me the glass, then slowly measured out a small amount for himself, fussing over its size, making certain it didn’t exceed a specific amount.

  “I like your house,” I said.

  “I haven’t done much to it.”

  “But it’s very solid—and the furniture is so late nineteenth century . . .”

  “My mom would have liked to have heard you say that. She picked it all out.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She was a music teacher in a high school here in Calgary.”

  “Was she your piano teacher?” I asked.

  He nodded slowly, then followed this with a small sip of his rye.

  “She must have been so proud of you when you got into the Royal College of Music.”

  He fell silent and downed the rest of the whiskey in one go. Then he stared down into his glass for a very long time.

  “Have I said the wrong thing?” I asked.

  He shook his head and started fingering his glass while furtively glancing at the bottle of Crown Royal. It was clear he so wanted another drink—but had to limit himself to just one.

  Finally: “I had a full music scholarship to the University of Toronto. While there I studied with Andrei Pietowski. Polish émigré. Brilliant and very demanding. He thought I had ‘it,’ that I was going to be the next Glenn Gould. He even had me play for this Austrian pianist named Brendel when he came through Toronto. Brendel was living in London. He had connections at the Royal College. I got a full scholarship there. That was 1972.”

  “And then?”

  “I arrived in London. I started at the Royal College. And . . .”

  Another of his fall-silent moments.

  “You want another rye?” he asked me.

  “Sure,” I said, holding out my glass. He splashed a few more fingers of whiskey in it. Then, with two distinct globules of sweat rolling down his face, he poured out another finger of rye into his own glass. As soon as he’d done that he stood up and disappeared into the kitchen with the bottle.

  When he returned he said to me: “If you want another top-up it’s by the sink. If I start going for it, tell me not to, OK?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  There was a slight quiver to his lips as he raised the glass. Once he had downed the shot in one go, he shut his eyes tightly, an anxious glow of relief filling his face. He put the glass down.

  “In London I had a breakdown,” he said. “It happened around a month after I got there. I’d been assigned by the Royal College to this big-cheese Viennese guy name Zimmermann. Tyrannical, exacting, never kind. I was his star pupil. He told me that two weeks into our ‘collaboration,’ as he called it. He thought I was so good he insisted we ‘immediately try to scale Everest.’ ‘So what if you fall, Canadian,’ he said in this thick Viennese accent. ‘I will be the one with the rope to pull you back up again. So come now, we scale Everest.’ ”

  “What did he mean by th
at?”

  “The Hammerklavier sonata by Beethoven. It’s number twenty-nine—and the most taxing. You can’t approach it lightly. It’s fiendish—and perhaps the greatest exploration of the infinite musicalness of the piano that has ever been composed. I went to the library. I got the score. We started to work on it during our three one-hour sessions each week. Zimmermann was—as always—scathing. But that was part of his strategy as a teacher, and I always responded to it. I aimed to please.”

  “And he was pleased?”

  “By the end of the second week, he told me: ‘You will be playing the Hammerklavier on the concert platform within eighteen months. You will scale Everest.’

  “The next day I was working alone on the scherzo in one of the soundproof rooms at the Royal College. Third movement, bars three to eight. Suddenly my fingers froze. They literally stopped dead over the keys. I couldn’t move them, I couldn’t move myself. I don’t know what happened. It was like someone flipped a switch in my brain and rendered me immobile. Another student found me there an hour later, catatonic, unresponsive to anything he said. They called an ambulance. I was admitted to a hospital. I stayed in that unresponsive state for about four weeks. Finally, my mom—who flew over to be with me—agreed to let them try electric-shock treatments to bring me back. The shocks worked. I came back.”

  He fingered the whiskey glass again, so wanting another drink.

  “But I never played the piano again,” he finally said. “No, that’s a lie. I played the piano all the time. Because once Mom got me repatriated to Canada and I started to function again, I did start teaching piano . . . in Hamilton, Ontario.”

  “Why Hamilton?”

  “I spent around six months in a psychiatric hospital there when I got back. There was a shrink in residence who specialized in my sort of manic depression, and my consultant in London had once worked with the guy, so it was decided to send me to him. That’s where I met my wife, Jessica. She was a nurse on my ward.”