The Changing of Keys, page 8
It did not even cross my mind that she might confide in me. I expected to have to startle and shame the information from her, sting her into revelation.
I sipped my soda and examined some magazines that had come while I was away; some were music publications I’d want to look at later. Mother’s quarterly church bulletin had a largish picture of Colin Atcheson on the front with the caption, “Our head altar boy is to return to England with his family. Rector Parry calls the loss to St. Peter of the Sea ‘a great sorrow.’” Colin looked rather pleased with himself.
“There’s a bit of post for you on your desk,” Mother announced. “It will be out of date now—it was an invitation to the Atchesons’ farewell party in September. Everyone knew you couldn’t come, of course, but all the church families and schoolmates were invited. It was quite a nice send-off for them.”
“No one gave me a nice send-off.” I couldn’t help it, it just popped out of me.
“You were coming back at Christmas.”
Our mutual awareness of my not wanting to return pervaded the air and remained there throughout tea. Conversation continued to be sparse—it was easier to eat five or six macaroons than to make disingenuous chitchat.
After our meal, she excused me from helping with the washing up—“I’m sure you’re tired”—and I walked out of the house to look at the sunset. Huge pink clouds hung in the sky and all the vegetation glowed as if it had been irradiated and would soon vaporize. The bungalows, the sand—all were beginning the transition from orange-pink-red to violet-gray.
I had a sudden desire to see the water. I don’t know why. I had a weird sensation in the back of my head as if an alarm had gone off and were silently shocking me with tiny jolts of electricity, as if I knew I was going to be sorry, but I couldn’t stop the slow scuffing steps my feet were taking into the sand at the end of the pavement. The palmettos came only to my shoulders now, but were denser, and the sketchy path was interrupted by enormous weeds and emerging sea grape. Surely, other people came here—and yet the sand looked printless all the way to the shells and debris that marked the high-tide line.
I hadn’t stood here for six years, hadn’t thought I ever would again. I stared at the spot where my parents used to sit, tried to see my father lying there, the pattern of the blanket, the shape of his hands, his face. The details eluded me; I remembered only white skin, dark hair, white sand, shadows. He was gone, dissolved. The graying turquoise and gold water rippled into the little cove, the small waves breaking into bubbles and swirls of sand upon the beach. There was nothing on the water, no distant shape or sail or floating bit of wood to arrest the ocean’s smooth, blank regard. It admitted nothing, had left no evidence of what it took.
Had it been that calm when it filled my father’s lungs, that impassive as he writhed and struggled, clawing at his throat as if his desperate fingers could draw the fluid from it as they had drawn music from lifeless wood and wire? Had tears come to his eyes in his last panic, the first few molecules of himself to become indistinguishable from the medium of his death?
There was no mark on that unimpressible surface. Was that how it would always be for us, him and me, to be stilled by this flat silence, this cold, killing refusal to respond? We had to make it feel, make it acknowledge us, what it had done to us. I picked up a stone and threw it as hard as I could, awkwardly, threw another and another, scarcely waiting to see the brief injury each caused in the shining infinity of glass. I ran into the water, kicking it with my shoes, but it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough, and I raced up the beach, frantically stripping a palmetto frond from the stalk, slicing my hand, which poured blood down the green spikes as I tore into the sea, thrashing the dark water, thrashing it as if I could force it to cry out. And it was only I that cried out, instead.
VII
What was it she told me?
Not much. Not then—very little that I hadn’t guessed at, really. There was a lot of shouting that night, starting with her hoarse and desperate calls as she ran down the sand, terrified—it turned out—that she would find me drowned as the police had found my father. Her relief and fury at discovering me on my feet, with no worse injuries than a cut hand and squelchy shoes, wrenched fierce sobs from her, the likes of which I had never heard her utter before. And tears. Real, actual tears that streaked her face and made her nose drip. I could hardly make out what she was saying over and over as she pulled me up the beach and onto solid pavement; it sounded like “Not that,” punctuated every so often by a clear and enraged “What were you doing?” which seemed to indicate somehow that it wasn’t enough that I was alive, but that I also owed her a satisfactory rationale for my madness.
Not that she stopped for an answer, or for anything more than to wipe her face with her hand before half-dragging me into the house. And there we stood, both of us red, breathless and running with different kinds of saltwater, as at odds with the cool, impassive order of home as if we had been a couple of feral cats suddenly pulled indoors out of a hard rain. For a moment, I felt a strange kinship with her.
“Kick off those shoes at once and come to the kitchen,” she ordered in a more normal voice, and strode around me to arm herself with soap and towels. Her examination revealed that the cut on my palm, though long and painful, was shallow, and after cleaning and bandaging it for me, she sent me off to change clothes. Neither of us said much. I realized that it hadn’t even occurred to me to worry whether or not my injury would affect my playing and I felt certain that it hadn’t occurred to her, either. Another first.
I stripped off my clothes and left them in a sodden pile. I felt…good. Oddly good. Being in no hurry to return to my mother, I took a long bath and enjoyed the sensation of salt and sweat dissolving in the cool water—cooler and glassier than the ocean, and yet not my enemy. I lay there watching a brown moth beating its wings in arpeggios of sixty-fourth notes around the overhead light before soaping myself as best I could without getting the bandaged hand wet and submerging myself completely, arm held aloft like a periscope, to rinse. I dried off, dressed in shorts and a shirt I had bought in Chicago, and strolled into the sitting room; Mother was dead ahead on the screened porch, as usual, but standing with her unopened Bible in her hands, looking toward the cove that she couldn’t actually see because of the overgrown vegetation and the darkening sky outside. Her body in its trim cotton dress seemed tiny and stooped, tired. It had never looked so to me before. I wondered suddenly if I had grown since the summer.
A kind of power filled me. “Mother, there’s something I want to ask you.”
My voice startled her—could she have lost her extra-sensory ability to detect my presence?—and she dropped the book, pressing her fingers to her mouth before picking it up and facing me. She held it to her the way a naked woman would clutch the slip she had just let fall before an intruder entered. I addressed her boldly.
“Mother, why were you crying before? That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you truly cry.”
She stared at me without answering. I frowned.
“Mother, I know you heard me.”
“Yes,” she said a little raspily, and cleared her throat. “I heard you. I should think the answer would be obvious.”
“Maybe to you. But I’d like to hear it.”
I could see her trying to be herself, to muster her usual cold dignity and command, but that spell seemed broken for now. She pulled the Bible in tightly. “I was…afraid. I couldn’t find you and I was afraid that you had…that you were drowning.”
“And what difference would that make?”
She looked at me as if I had struck her.
“What? How can you…”
“No, stop playing all innocent, Mother! What real difference would my drowning make? Father drowned and you’ve never seemed to miss him. You never, ever talk about him. Why would you miss me any more than him?”
“Your father,” she started, and couldn’t seem to utter another sound. Tears ran down her cheeks—twice in one day!—and she covered her mouth with her hand, bending over her book as if she were ill.
An icy little thrill of triumph corkscrewed through my solar plexus, transforming into alarm as she staggered. I pulled over a chair and she sat, still soundless and folded over, while I found a box of tissues, putting it at her feet when she wouldn’t release her hands to take it. I had no idea what to do next. Waiting hopefully for my mother to regain control was an entirely new experience for me. My brief, predatory satisfaction at finally cracking her curtain wall was coming with an aftertaste of unease, as if her illness were catching.
“Mother.”
She straightened up a bit and lay the Bible on her lap, reaching for a tissue and taking a couple of deep, ragged breaths as she patted her eyes and turned them to me.
“Is this what you want so much to hear?” she whispered. “That I wanted to die when your father did? Well, I did. I did. But I lived, instead. I lived for you.”
I broke in, suddenly angry. “For me? Or for my glorious career? If I’m so important, why won’t you talk to me? Why do you plan my life for me behind my back? Why haven’t I ever heard you say you”—and I had to push the word out—“love me?”
“Say?” Steel had reentered my mother’s eyes and frame. “Saying you love someone means nothing, nothing at all. You have to live as God intended, cherish his gifts, serve his will in deeds, not words. Only then does love become something more than sinful selfishness.”
Her gaze dropped to the book in her lap and, with her forefinger, she traced the gilded cross on its cover.
“After your father…I knew I could raise you to be the man and artist you were intended to be only if I loved God first.”
“So loving God first was your way of being an affectionate mother? I didn’t need hugs or kisses or kind words because God was going to make everything all right for me as long as he was top of your list?”
I stood over her, arms flung wide, incredulous.
She lifted her chin with regimental precision.
“Yes, you have been wanting to punish me for that for a long time, haven’t you? You’ve wanted to provoke me into telling you my feelings and my reasons. Well, you are a child still and you think like one. What are hugs and kisses when God has given you genius? What greater task could there be than to make sure that genius grows and succeeds? Everything I do and have done has been to carry out that task. Not for me, for you. It’s a sin to waste genius. I have to see that you rise as far as you can and I’ve had to do it alone. I had lost your father. God took him from me, his judgment. I couldn’t risk failing you, too.”
She was on her feet now, too, shouting into my face, reckless and unfamiliar. “I needed God’s help to raise you! I had to deserve God’s help.”
And that was all. The God she had shielded us both from so vigilantly had made his way in, after all, and long ago.
In the silence, I examined her flushed skin and sweat-dampened hair curiously.
“Why wouldn’t you deserve God’s help?”
Mother turned and picked up her Bible. “Pride,” she said curtly.
But her eyes flicked away as she said it.
VIII
Doing the Mahler Eighth at Usher Hall proved regrettable. Certainly for Usher Hall. But also for me. Of course, our reasons differed somewhat.
I was actually rather excited when the invitation was extended. I was only five years out of Juilliard at that point, and though I’d been a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and had already sung a number of roles in Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco, I hadn’t made more than a handful of concert appearances, mostly with small oratorio groups. So to be approached by the Boston Symphony to sing “Pater Ecstaticus,” first at Tanglewood and then in Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival, quite set me up: I’d be making my European debut in a showy gig with a top orchestra at one of the world’s greatest arts events.
The Eighth is an enormous piece; its nickname, the “Symphony of a Thousand,” exaggerates, but it feels like 1,000 musicians when you’re wedged onstage with two large choruses, seven other soloists, and over 150 instrumentalists, while facing a sizable children’s choir outposted in the seats of the upper balcony. It would be a claustrophobic experience in Times Square, frankly, but at Usher Hall, where the audience outnumbered the performers by only about three to one, it was an exercise in slow asphyxiation.
It took nearly twenty minutes just to get us all in our places. While crammed with the other soloists in a hallway leading to the stage-right wings, I struck up a conversation with one of the sopranos, who told me she’d overheard the festival-chorus manager, a stout Scot, inform his nearly 500 charges that he’d figured out mathematically how many of them could occupy each step of the staircase where they were to wait before going on. “Ay’ve done the sums,” he’d announced before distributing them vertically in their predetermined numbers.
We smirked enjoyably about this, she and I—she was a replacement who’d caught my eye at rehearsal the day before, a tall and beautiful brunette with a general air of amused sarcasm about her that I found enticing—and then we were on, striding to our chairs near the apron of the stage, where at last we sat like a line of penguins caught between the cliff’s edge and the restless mob of our black-and-white fellows teetering in tiers on the iceberg behind us. The precariousness of all those bodies in so few square feet added to my unease. Singing in a fully staged opera is stressful in a different way: There’s much more going on and you have to remember your entrances, exits, blocking, and characterization in addition to your music. But there’s a certain flexibility to it, as well, a sort of artistic emergency exit that exists because you can improvise. You’re playing someone else—should anything go amiss, you can react, distract, escape. In short, you can move. Not so on a concert stage, where you are you, locked in place by the sheer density of population and furniture and, more important, by the unspeakable formality of the proceedings—the choristers rigid in their tight ranks, the players fixed in their chairs, every person with one eye pinned to the conductor and the other to their scores in apprehension of the exactitude required and of the gut-shriveling, hara kiri-inducing shame that is any tiny error in performance protocol. As if the hall were a throne room, or worse, an artistic iron maiden in which the unforgiving punish the already repressed by fatally crushing them onto the spikes of the conductor’s autocratic displeasure.
If you do well, the combined effect of applause and the release from pressure at the end can be shocking and euphoric, like landing safely after flying through a thunderstorm. And if you don’t, the rites of bowing and exiting and returning to bow again amid the dwindling spatter of handclaps just feels like the last sadistic push on the door of the torture device within which you already stand dead, rictus affixed.
Fortunately, the solo parts of the Eighth are relatively brief, and my main bit didn’t come until the second half, so I was able to focus on my physical, rather than artistic, distress for some time. Usher was then a roundish hall of dark wood and cream walls, not as old as many, but redolent of an austere and down-at-heels dignity. The audience were arrayed in a semicircle round the stage in steeply raked rows, surrounding a large dark spot formed of child choristers in the upper-center seats, who would look and sound angelic while no doubt sniggering behind their folders about everyone facing them on stage. I tried not to look at them and instead concentrated on breathing calmly and evenly, despite the hard chair back that cut into my shoulder blades, the chorus basses thundering “Veni Creator” behind me and a dangerous desire to lean forward and try to catch the eye of Donna, the soprano, seated on the other side of the podium.
As impulses go, this was stupider than most, but also nearly irresistible, and it kept me shifting in my seat and sneaking sidelong glances that revealed only the flailing arms and flapping hair of the newly knighted maestro, whose brainchild this whole overpopulated pageant apparently was. By turning my head slightly to the right and straining my peripheral vision, I found I could see past the tenor, the contralto, the alto, and the other two sopranos just enough to detect the smooth knot of shining dark hair on Donna’s head, but nothing else. There were witticisms I wished to try on her, sardonic observations about the proceedings I was eager to make to see if they would twist that coolly elegant face sideways into the smile of amusement I had seen earlier. It was a smile that seemed to make some sort of pact with me, as if we shared something only we two were smart enough to appreciate—a smile both approving and, at the same time, shrewdly undeceived.
Hours yawned between the present and the moment when I could explore the complexities of that smile further; until then, my objective of not looking like an idiot became ever more imperative. We stood for the first septet, and before I came in, I heard Donna’s voice spin out her legato notes like a line of calligraphy written in silver. I remember wishing all the others would sit down and be quiet so I could hear how Donna’s voice blended with mine.
It went well, the first half, ending with a climax of blaring brass and tidal waves of choral sound that shook skeins of dust from the ornate ceiling. The soloists were guided back to our dressing rooms, but I didn’t stay long in mine. Instead, I quietly stepped round the corner to Donna’s and knocked. My hand and nerves wavered. She opened the door a tiny crack, saw who it was and, gratifyingly, opened it a bit wider. I said “hullo” and started to tell her that I thought her singing had been excellent but, without speaking, she pointed to her mouth and shook her head.
“Oh, um, I see. Vocal rest, good for you. I suppose I ought to do the same. Just wanted to ask you if you’d like to join me for a bite to eat, after, if, you know, you’re not too tired or…”
