This is what I remember. The choir began to sing (oh, yes, they brought in the choir to impress Parisi) and then Parisi started shouting in a thick Italian accent full of vowels that seemed to dance, “Stop! Stop! You crazy fools! You are going to kill the bambino! Towel, give me a towel! Oh sweet Jesus!”
Parisi knelt beside me and wiped my face with a towel damp with holy water. I gazed up at him—he was prettier than God, with that narrow little face and fat lips—and tried to look saintly, even though I was lying in my own piss and he was mopping up that and my drool. “This child! She needs a doctor! This is no vision. This is epilepsy!”
The only miracle in all of this was that the good priest was well acquainted with musicogenic epilepsy. A man in his village back home went into fits every time he heard a particularly sad, high-pitched Andalusian folk song about two ill-fated lovers. According to Parisi, everyone thought the man’s fits stemmed from a broken heart that had been administered to him at the tender age of seventeen by one of the village’s most amply hipped girls. It was spring—the time of festivals—and music was in the air, according to my lover-priest. And as fate would have it, a physician with the Royal Institute of Medicine happened by the village on his way to somewhere more important and witnessed the villager suffer a grand mal seizure in the courtyard while a street singer wailed about love gone wrong. The doctor suspected immediately what was afoot, being that he was a student of rare and obscure maladies. Now I ask, was that—the doctor’s presence in that two-bit village—a miracle, too?
Or do we sometimes just get lucky?
Two trips to Maryland and Johns Hopkins later (Parisi insisted, as he held Johns Hopkins in high esteem, having lived in Maryland just prior to accepting his post in Miami), my mother and Father Jaeger were finally convinced that, indeed, I was not special in the eyes of our Lord, was not experiencing and never had experienced anything remotely akin to a religious experience, and that I should be kept away from people for as long as it took for everyone to forget about this embarrassing incident.
As a result of my fall from grace, my mother retreated back into prayer, with nary a glance my way. My father remained his distant good self. My pastor, Father Jaeger, never spoke to me again. My visions withered into painful memory. My physicians at Johns Hopkins instructed my mother that never, never, never was I to hear plainsong again. My crush on Father Parisi would have followed my visions into painful memory except for the fact that I was forever grateful and only superficially bitter that he’d found me out. And, I must say, the experience really did conjure in me a hunger for God. It was a hunger that would stay with me up until my teen years, when it was supplanted by my appetite for sex.
A Letter Written by Father Matthew Jaeger to God, Never Mailed, Just Balled Up and Then Burned in the Rectory’s Kitchen Sink
Dear Heavenly Savior,
Oh blessed one from whom all grace flows, what have I done? What on God’s green earth have I done!
I made a total sniveling fool out of myself in front of Father Parisi, who, I’m sure, has already reported this directly to the new archbishop in Miami. Of course, he’ll tell Bishop Beaver immediately upon the latter’s return from his big fat Roman holiday.
No! No! No! He has probably phoned Beaver in Rome already. These things—these stupid, ridiculous, embarrassing foul-ups—are like viruses.
I’M PROBABLY BEING MADE FUN OF AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS OF THE CHURCH AT THIS VERY MOMENT!!!!
Oh dear God, what should I do? I was operating out of your divine goodness, and now I am a laughing stock! Give me a sign. Tell me how I should proceed. Must I endure this humiliation the rest of my days? Dear Lord, I am at prayer all the time. I am listening.
Your faithful servant,
Matt
Four Journal Entries Written by Murmur Lee Harp During the Time of Her Independent Scholastic Study of the Medical Phenomenon Known as Musicogenic Epilepsy
December 8, 1985
Dear Journal,
I came upon this in my research today:
PLAINSONG,
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS
GREGORIAN CHANT,
IS DIATONIC.
What in Saint Rita’s name is diatonic? you may well be asking. Aha, I have the answer!
DIATONIC: MUSIC USING ONLY
THE SEVEN TONES OF A STANDARD
SCALE WITHOUT CHROMATIC ALTERATIONS.
That’s it! The key to my soul: no chromatic alterations. But it gets better:
PLAINSONG HAS A FREE RHYTHM
DETERMINED BY THE TEXT.
Oh yes! Rhythm determined by text. It’s wholly beautiful: a metaphor for life. At least my life. And I hope it will be a metaphor for my marriage. You know, free and kind of wild and every day determined by the earth’s pull, by what has already been written in heaven’s palm.
Erik doesn’t know about the epilepsy. Why should I tell him? I mean, no one living—other than Charlee, and her lips are sealed—knows about it. To say the words musicogenic epilepsy is to open the door to it. And that door was slammed shut when I was a child. Even this research spooks me, but my need to understand the brainstorms that will evidently erupt—no matter how hard I fight against it—with the simple hearing of one sweet strain of ancient chant overrides the fear.
No. He’ll never know. I’ll put a dusting of cayenne in his coffee every morning so that he’ll be content in his ignorance. That’s what we women have to do: sprinkle minor spells here and there to keep the status quo.
More later.
Signed,
Murmurmurmurmurmurmurmur Lee
January 1, 1986
Dear Journal,
The latest turn of the screw is this: I’ve become obsessed with whale song. But the problem is, I fear—rationally or not, I don’t know—that their music might be so similar to chant that it will toss me back into that land of electrical overload, that odd world of false angels and saints. So I won’t listen to it. Which means, like chant, I study their music without ever hearing it.
Is this similar to a blind man who paints? A deaf man who dances? A mute who sings in her dreams? Is this some kind of curse?
I read about a Stanford scientist who believes humans are coming to an appreciation of music—its aesthetics and its composition—later than other animals. Isn’t that fabulous? It means that the highest mammal on the food chain is actually playing an eternal game of catch-up.
And I believe it. Look at the whales. They were here way before we were. Which means—duh!—they were composing music BEFORE we were. They didn’t start singing because they heard some boom box blasting off the bow of a ship. It’s true! Everything I read about whale song suggests that not only have they been composing and performing for eons but also that the structure of their songs is extremely similar to human song. Same-same. They use similar rhythms, phrasings. Their compositions rhyme. They mix percussive and pure tones. Their songs even follow the ABA form, continuously playing with variations on themes. Just like Thelonius. Just like Parker. Just like Davis.
Perhaps this explains the Bachs and Mozarts among us. Perhaps their DNA retained more of the whale coding than that of most humans. Yeah, good old Bach, who would nearly faint at a sudden trumpet blast. And Mozart, whose strange laughter could shatter crystal. God, I wonder what THEIR brains looked like!
Mur
March 6, 1986
Dear Journal,
Now listen to this. If humpback whales compose and perform what amount to symphonies, and if whale pods teach and exchange songs, and if even your most garden-variety songbird trills Western music scales the likes of which inspired Chopin, and if wolf packs at the full moon howl wolf songs that are complex, conjoined, interrelated, and ancient, then why are humans so arrogant as to believe we have the corner on song?
I mean, maybe—just maybe—we’re all whistling the same tune, that there is some deep primal gateway to the brain that leads to the most ancient core of our being and it is from there that we respond to this universal pan-cre
ature music.
If you really think about music and song—why they exist and all that—the questions become awesome. What is the purpose of language? And what is the difference between language and song? And why does music played slowly in a minor key cause us to feel blue? Why? And how about major-key quick-tempo tunes? They get us all revved up.
This is important stuff. This is primal crawling out of the muck stuff. Wolves don’t howl wolf songs because God flicks a switch in their cerebral cortexes. They howl because a series of events causes them to WANT to sing. That’s the same reason humans belt out tunes.
What is all this about? I want to know why I respond to music the way I do, why chant makes me mad. What is really going on inside my brain?
We know the symptoms. That’s it. We’ve given them fancy, difficult-to-pronounce names. But we don’t know the whys, the hows, the whats. Yes, we may all be singing, but we don’t yet recognize or even admit to the universality of our song.
Mur
April 10, 1986
Dear Journal,
Sorry to say I didn’t obtain this from the primary source, but from a journal on musicogenic epilepsy. The author claims that the first known reference to said malady was back in the sixteenth century. Evidently, some poor guy seized every time he heard a lyre. But better than that is this: Old William Shakespeare himself makes reference to it in The Merchant of Venice: “Some that are mad if they behold a cat, and others, when the bagpipe sings i’ th’ nose, / Cannot contain their urine . . .” That’s what the article claimed Shakespeare was talking about. Sounds about right to me.
As my wedding date nears, I find myself spending more time reading about this and worrying. Am I worrying about the epilepsy—something that hasn’t reared its grand mal head in years—so that I don’t go mad thinking about what all can go wrong once I say I do? His parents are insisting we get married in their church. I explained to Erik that I’m not a believer, that for me, God exists in the mud and the yellow eyes of birds. He just laughed and said, “It’s what Daddy wants.” So First Baptist Church, here we come. If I believed in hell, my having a Christian marriage ceremony would certainly land me there. Well, at least I don’t have to worry about going grand mal when they play “The Old Rugged Cross.”
Mur
Charleston Rowena Mudd
I think Murmur married Erik Nathanson because she went temporarily insane. It happens. Perfectly rational children become teenagers, and suddenly their genitals take over. And also, Murmur’s parents—while nice enough—never seemed to want her. Really. Once her stint as a child saint ended, life was back to Murmur and me, with her parents providing food and shelter and a minimum of interference. Maybe that’s what Erik provided: the interference she always craved. All I know for sure is that my sassy friend, who could spit in a snake’s eye and live to tell about it, folded like a Chinese fan every time he walked into a room.
Erik was a golfer who dabbled in law. His trust fund financed his undisciplined life in the courtroom, on the greens, and especially at the clubhouse. I was never a member of the country club, but word gets around: Erik dipped his stick all over town. His minor success as a lawyer was the fortunate result of his daddy being the past mayor and Erik being a charmer. Men liked him as much as women. They admired—no, coveted—his looks: the square jaw, the diamond face, the bright eyes, which never gave away what he was thinking (yes, people constantly gave him the benefit of the doubt, blithely assuming he had a clue). Mostly, they wanted his hair. It was Breck hair: longish—about chin level—blond, and full of body, actually silky, the kind of hair women dream of having. In my seasoned opinion, at his best Erik was a dumb blond, but because he had testicles, his idiocy went unnoticed, or was excused, at least.
Some people interpreted his mental dwarfism as southern-boy gall. Stories—appalling in my view but offered as praise—swept through town like an outbreak of pinkeye. Take this little jewel, for example: Erik had been practicing for only eight months when he stood before Judge Cooksey and informed him that he wanted a three-day postponement because the weather was a perfect seventy-four degrees, with not much humidity, and he didn’t want to waste his time in the courtroom when he could be out on the links. The judge granted the postponement. Erik’s client, a kid charged with his first count of shoplifting, looked at the judge, then at his lawyer, then over his shoulder at his mother, and burst into tears.
Erik was older than Murmur by five years. They married the summer of our high school graduation. They lived in St. Augustine Beach, right on the water, and stayed there until the fall, when the house became a weekend getaway and they headed to Gainesville and the University of Florida, where Erik would—by the grace of that fine hair and good straight teeth—squeak up a law degree. (I’m harsh on Erik, I admit. But believe me, this isn’t an apology, nor even a sugar-coated diatribe. It’s the Yankee truth.)
Consider this:
They had been married three weeks. Erik clerked in his dad’s law office weekdays and golfed on weekends. Murmur didn’t have much to do that summer other than keep house and please her groom. I was biding my time until mid-August, when I would head to Tallahassee and FSU and enroll in something—what, I didn’t know. Psychology. Sociology. Business. Political Science. Philosophy. God, there were so many choices. The only thing clear to me was that I was going to go to college and that while there a miracle would occur and my future would become self-evident. So Murmur and I decided that until the reality of fall descended and we were plunged into adulthood and college, we would work on our tans, drink beer, join Amnesty International, cut our hair really short, read Proust, avoid anyone who strolled around in public in warm-up suits, write letters to the editor, in which we would point out the ludicrous editorial policies of the St. Augustine Record, and avoid Bobby Meyerbach because he stank.
I arrived at their house one morning in June at around 10:30. Erik’s Porsche was parked out front. I didn’t know what he was doing home, but I figured it wouldn’t stall our plans, or Murmur would have phoned. I made my way through a winding path lined with potted herbs, the Crayola faces of zinnias, an immutable sundial, and a rusting fish basket filled with seashells. Since Erik was home, I decided to behave like company. I knocked on the front door, which Murmur had painted Chinese red shortly after moving in, because she said red doors welcomed in good spirits and scared away evil ones. No answer. Brushing aside the nagging thought that Murmur had ruined everything by getting married, I rang the doorbell. Still no answer. I walked around the side of the house to the kitchen door. She’d painted it blue. I didn’t know why. It was open, and I said to hell with Erik, and I walked on in. I started to call Murmur’s name but stopped short. The kitchen opened into a dining room. Behind the old pine dinner table hung a large mottled mirror. Murmur and Erik were reflected in its beveled light. He was dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, she in denim shorts and a paisley halter top, which he gripped by one hand and yanked.
“Don’t! Erik, we’re just going to lie on the beach. We want to get some sun. That’s all.”
“You will not go out there looking like a tramp. You’re my wife now. Murmur the tramp is dead. Remember that, you little bitch. The tramp is dead.”
“Erik, I am not a tramp. Baby, I love you.” She reminded me of a little girl seeking an angry father’s love and forgiveness. I didn’t want to bear witness to this, but I couldn’t move.
Erik grabbed her by her hair. He wound it around his fist and pulled it taut. “You were a tramp when I married you. Now you’re not. I’m the reason, the only reason, you’re not still a beach whore.” He let go of her hair and jabbed his finger in her chest over and over, forcing her to back up, moving her out of the mirror’s reflection. “You will do as I say. You will not defy me. You are mine now. Do you understand?”
Unwilling to hear Murmur’s answer or witness her humiliation, I decided I had only one choice, and that was to make myself known. “Murmur!” I called, trying to keep the frantic warble in check
. “I’m here! You ready?”
She did not respond. But Erik did. “Charlee!”
He strode into the kitchen, all smiles. “Hey, how you doing?” He leaned in and kissed my cheek. “I was just on my way out. Murmur is in the back, doing something. I don’t know what. Give her five minutes or so.” He plucked an apple out of the fruit basket on the kitchen counter and rubbed it against his starched white shirt.
“Okay.” I scratched an imaginary itch on my arm. “I’ll just wait here.”
“Good.” He scanned the kitchen. “Where’s my briefcase. Ah.” He grabbed it off the kitchen stool. He patted the backrest. “Have a seat.”
I did as I was told. I took some solace in the fact that he didn’t seem to have a clue that I’d seen the little spat. He fiddled with the lock combination on the briefcase and said, “Oh, by the way, you and Murmur aren’t going to the beach today. Just stay up near the house.”
“Sure.”
He shot me a big grin, a pretty-boy movie-star grin, and his eyes betrayed nothing. “See ya.”
“Yeah.”
Just before he stepped out the blue door, which, I decided, needed to be red—evil spirits and all—he checked out his hair in a small mirror that hung precariously from the doorjamb by a blue silk ribbon, and then he was gone.
I stayed seated on the stool, scared to move.
“Charlee?” Murmur yelled.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s do something besides the beach today. I’m not in the mood.” She sounded, I thought, falsely chipper.
“Okay. Fine by me.” I don’t know why I decided to play along. I guess I felt guilty for having spied on her—even though it wasn’t intentional—and, in all honesty, I was chickenshit. I mean, we all do it: wait for the person in crisis to fess up before we say anything.
The Problem with Murmur Lee Page 9