A Lesser Light, page 10
He arrived at six o’clock sharp, received as though he brought with him secrets untold and unimagined. Some of the solemnity was replaced by general and genuine enthusiasm for the ascension at hand, but William’s demeanor was aggrieved, and as he passed among the huff-snuffs, he alternated his glances from their congratulatory smiles to the windows behind Willa where the storm continued to rise with a wicked and baffling vengeance. For all those fleeting looks, he never once considered the piano. And when Ernst Sauer entered the Blue Room, handing his hat to the Tyler, who’d ushered him in personally, her father’s attention turned all at once and completely to the Right Worshipful Master.
Ernst Sauer fairly danced to the altar at the head of the room, the cane he held a partner and pike at once. He used it to hammer the altar floor. When the assembled lodge took their seats along the north and south walls, he spoke: “Good evening, all. Good evening and thank you for your punctiliousness. Even with the barbarous weather, it appears we’re a quorum.” He pulled a note from his coat pocket and, thus reminded, glanced across the room to the piano, where Willa sat, unnoticed until then. “Our official agenda this evening is exact and will commence at precisely six-thirty.” Several of those in attendance checked their watches. “But afore our ceremony to honor Dr. William Brandt and his ascension to Grand Master, our inestimable brother has requested a special performance by his nephew, here from the fair state of Virginia and ready, as far as I can tell from across the room, to perform for our pleasure.”
Several of those same heads that had checked their watches now turned to see Willa sitting upright at the piano, the score of the sonata spread on the music rack before her. “The young Mister Ringen will, I believe, present to us”—here he consulted his note again—“Beethoven’s Sonata number 14, colloquially known as ‘The Moonlight Sonata.’ A favorite of the esteemed Dr. Brandt.”
Spinning on his cane, Ernst Sauer turned and sat upon the elaborate Master’s chair under the baldachin.
Willa—no, William, or Will—stood and adjusted the peruke and stepped from behind the piano, where he bowed to his uncle and Ernst Sauer in turn. He returned to the piano bench and flipped the tails of his coat out from under him as he sat. He set his fingers on the keys and absorbed the hush of the hundred gathered men.
But the music wouldn’t come to him, so he gave himself back over to Willa, who began pianissimo.
* * *
DAYS AND MONTHS and even years later, Theodulf would believe he heard the music from that dark bench in the main floor lobby. He’d believe it—and not the elevator—carried him up to the Blue Room. That it had the power to lift him. And to return him. “Quasi una fantasia.” The same music he’d heard in a Paris café five years earlier. The one on the Île Saint-Louis. The last night he’d been happy.
Waiting for the liftman to fasten the cage shut, he caught its distant melody. The excruciating slowness of the adagio—equal parts music and memory—drew him through his reflection in the mirror and back–back–back. He could taste the sugar and anise of la fée verte at the zinc bar in France; could, when he closed his eyes against the mirror, see instead that pianist’s ecstasy. Could see his lithe fingers touching the music from the keys. Those same hands would later trace across his ribs with a similar flourish. Those memories he kept bunkered someplace even lower than his bowels? They rose in him as the elevator did the Opera building. Between the fifth and sixth floors, the music nearly dissolved him. He felt suppliant. Ill. Aroused. But more than anything, he felt unrepentant.
The lift came to a jerking halt. The gate accordioned back, and he hurried across the hallway where the Tyler let him into the lodge. The music was now urgent through a haze of cigar smoke so dense it seemed almost to drop the tone an octave. He saw the boy playing and was for a moment stunned, but then the adagio became less a sound in his ears than a magnetic force that led him to a seat along the wall.
From there Theodulf watched him play. He sported an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket that ballooned from his slight shoulders as he moved. He wore a démodé periwig, and his face, when he lifted it, rose as pale and serene as the moon, a strange, muliebral kindness catching in the candlelight from the chandeliers. Theodulf reached for his watch, but only held it in his pocket. The tick-tock of its movement, though, was nowhere to be found. Drowned, it was. By the music or the storm outside or the one within his rotten body, who could say?
In the windows behind the boy, the blackness of the night was frantic. He could tell not only from the way it danced along the leaded glass, but because there existed in its pith an even greater darkness wanting expression. My God, how he knew that feeling. He’d had it most of his life.
He knew also he should turn away from the night. From the song and from the boy. He should dampen it. But how could he? Better to try to bottle that hurricane wind.
Whenever the boy feinted left—into the darker notes—Theodulf found his own head nodding along. One measure, and another, and a third. He’d wait for the music to lift them again, which it did, over and over, and Theodulf felt not only the elegance of Beethoven’s composition but that thing at the heart of it.
He supposed this was how convening with God was supposed to make him feel. In communion. Entire. Forgiven. Saved. So why did he feel instead the opposite? Why, when he turned his words or thoughts or deeds to God, did he feel abandoned? And why did that abandonment always attend the most precious, most divine moments of his life? Perhaps he could capture the answer to these questions while bottling the wind!
As he listened to the boy play, recalling the same melody from across time and the whole Atlantic Ocean, he squelched those questions of Providence and gave himself over instead to the holiness of the moment, turning his head up not in prayer but in devotion all the same. On the alabaster ceiling, he saw the same hue as the boy wore upon his face and tresses. Theodulf imagined the fineness of the boy’s fingers. He imagined the suppleness of the boy’s cheek beneath his own rough hand. The music and his musings inflamed him, and, as the adagio neared its end, he resolved to look upon the boy once more.
Now Theodulf saw he wore complexion powder and if the realization perplexed Theodulf, it also aroused him even more. When the boy lifted his hand to turn the score, Theodulf saw it first through the haze of cigar smoke and again reflected in the window. He as much as felt it. And held it. And in order to imprint it permanently in his memory, Theodulf pressed his thumbs into his eyes and held them there until the first notes of the allegretto galloped through the room, at which point he stood and hurried back through the assembled guests and out of the Blue Room. He’d been there for all of three minutes and could bear not one second more.
* * *
WILLA’S PIANO PEDAGOGUE, Herr Volk—a self-described celibate, distant and final living relation of Cardinal Volk, a great-great-grandnephew or some such, a designation he was exceedingly proud of, and a musician himself entrenched in anonymity, composer of the once-performed Nördlich mit Gott, which he considered to be a rebuttal of sorts to Beethoven’s masterwork but which a critic called “cacophonous and mired in mawkishness”—often reminded her that Franz Liszt, a devout Catholic who took the four minor orders of the church before his death, described the middle movement of Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp Minor as a flower between two chasms.
For Willa, a more apt simile was that it was like a bird between two chasms, and when her hand rose to turn the score in the Blue Room, from the first to the second movement and the cheerful allegretto that greeted her there, she saw the wing of a gull, not her own trembling flesh. The sight of it gave her a moment’s panic, and in the pause before she commenced—she held it for two beats—as her hand flew back down to the keys, she risked a third beat in anticipation of the storm outside the window.
What she sensed was less the disturbance of the atmosphere than the one in her own mind. This sometimes happened at the piano. Especially if she were playing with the score—a practice Herr Volk insisted on—instead of by ear, which she preferred and believed was how music ought to be performed. But she was doubtful. Always. And her own grievous suspicions of her gifts were as wont to possess her by way of the wind as by Herr Volk’s frequent admonishments. Those came weekly, when she visited his home by Chester Creek, entered its tobacco- and coffee-soaked hallowedness, and suffered her lesson. He came from that school of instruction rooted mainly in his own failures, each suggestion carried on his rank breath and borne of his never having achieved renown, despite a lifelong effort. He formerly bred and rode dressage horses and still kept a pair of retired Westphalians in a stable up by Hunters Park, and as Ernst Sauer walked with a cane, so Herr Volk carried a black leather riding crop that he used both as metronome and pointer. When his frustration was most roused, it would tremble, poised, in his hand.
His lack of accomplishment as a player and composer did not diminish his ability as a pedagogue, though, and despite his avarice and sourness and plain lack of regard for her, he must have had some appreciation for her talent. After all, he’d overlooked her family’s heathenism and continued to tutor her for four years now. What he hadn’t yet taught her was how to abandon herself to the music—he blamed her lack of faith in God—and it was in such moments of awareness, of her consciousness holding forth, that he’d drum the trembling black leather on her hand. Sometimes with more force than others. That strap always brought her back to the notes.
There in the Blue Room, she felt very far from the music indeed. So far that she couldn’t even hear it. Instead, she listened to the wind, which she was decidedly not playing away, as she’d promised her father she would.
By the time she reached the Presto agitato, she was properly shaken. What she envisioned between her eyes and the score were not her hands, but a pair of gull’s wings, thrashing as though caught in the gale. The chasm was all around her. And while the wind gusted ever more wildly, the gull flapped from key to key. A tear rolled down her cheek, leaving a streak of pale flesh in the complexion powder.
Now the thews in her forearms and fingers grew taut. The gull was in gliding flight and Willa winging with it. Off! Into what unhappiness? What confusion? She could not name it. Could hardly even know it was there except by virtue of her loneliness in that moment. To regain herself, she lifted her right foot above the damper pedal and let it linger there, considering a violation of Beethoven’s own wishes. This simple gesture redirected her, and she began to hear the music again.
And there! A luftpause in her mind (Herr Volk was famous for adding them to his scores). She took a gulping breath that seemed to open her ears even wider. Her fingers were no longer wings. The gull had gone into the recesses of the Blue Room or the night or her own waking dream, and suddenly she was back in the melody, back in the moment and the smoke and the men sitting all round with their cigars and their inscrutable faces.
But only her father mattered, his face not vacant at all but, like Willa’s gull, caught between two chasms—the storm outside and the one in his conscience. She must appease him. Now. She would try again—and harder—to play away the wind.
She closed her eyes once more to the sheets of music before her. She closed them against the worried look on her father’s face. One hundred measures. That was all she had left.
The music rose. To her ears and her ego.
She felt as if she were soaring on the crescendos. Gliding on the diminuendos. Each chord an eddy in the heart of her consciousness, but all of it perfectly controlled and predestined. It inhabited her.
The trills now shuddering. The hair on her arms raised as if by static electricity. A lusty stirring in her bowels. She could not breathe for the commotion.
And time, vanished! Only sound remained. And her being carried. Her carrying. The splendor. Heavenly.
Here the final adagio. If God existed, these were His whispers.
Now the quarter rests, tempo primo. Her favorite sound in all the world, these notes. If she only ever heard them again, if she only ever felt them, she would be happy. Ecstatic.
But onward! Nine measures more. Thirty seconds. Thirty years. The gull into eternity, for all it was.
The closing flourish played tempestuously. Fortissimo.
Whole rest.
Darkness.
The wind played away.
Abyss. Chasm.
Was it an hour before she heard the generous applause? Or a single moment? In either case, it returned her to her body. All the men, standing in front of their chairs, their cigars clenched in their teeth behind their smiling lips. Alderman Haven, the man who would one day become mayor, even wiped a tear from beneath his own eye.
Willa, fearful, looked to her father. He stood with the others. Applauding but distant. Willa stood herself, thought to curtsy, but remembered in the nick of time and bowed instead. A proper aristocrat.
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” This was Ernst Sauer speaking. He hammered his cane upon the altar floor as he earlier had. “Gentlemen, please! We’ve all been moved by young Mister Ringen’s rousing performance.” He spoke above the lingering applause, and saluted Will from his perch at the altar, waiting for everyone to quiet.
When they did, he continued. “You have brought the storm inside, young sir. You have done your uncle proud.” He straightened his necktie and lowered his chin, and in a tone altogether changed said, “But now we must onward with the solemn and righteous occasion at hand. Bid your uncle farewell, so we might commence our evening’s agenda.”
Willa bowed in her father’s direction, then made for the door through which she’d entered. Only a friendly hand, reaching from among the Masons, saved her from that faulty exit. Instead, she crossed the Blue Room, giving her father one more glance.
* * *
IN THE MAIN FLOOR LOBBY, Theodulf watched the boy at the revolving door, his young silhouette cut as if by a Parisian silhouettist. For several minutes he sat there, admonishing himself to keep quiet, to let the boy walk away. But the longer he regarded him, the more impossible his task. Finally, he submitted, stood, and cleared his throat loud enough for the boy to hear.
Startled, the wigged boy turned, his figuration animated now.
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” Theodulf said, risking a step forward.
The boy had about him some mouselike quality. Or maybe he felt cornered, on the one side by Theodulf, and on the other the storm outside. Aware of this possibility, Theodulf took a nimble stride sideways. “I was just sitting here, wondering how many times that sonata has been played. Over the past hundred-odd years.”
Was the boy listening? Look at him there!
“I saw it performed in Paris once. Some five years ago now, at Le Palais Garnier.” Theodulf put his hand over his heart. “Performed by a young virtuoso not much different in mien from you, friend.”
The boy buttoned the ill-fitting Crombie coat he wore.
“In any case,” Theodulf continued, feigning nonchalance despite feeling nearly breathless. “It’s the sort of question I almost always find myself lost in.” When the boy didn’t reply, Theodulf said again, “How many times has that music been performed? The impossible rumination of it? I can’t say why, but it gives me some sort of peace.” He crossed his arms and cocked his head at an angle, affecting an air of contemplation. “It’s quite an opposite thought from the ones that usually occupy me. I’m an attorney, you see. Mostly criminal cases, so you can imagine the comfort I take not only in my woolgathering, but in the music itself.”
“Sir?”
“The Moonlight Sonata. Your performance upstairs.” He looked toward the ceiling, as though he might see through the several floors above. “Poor Beethoven, the composer of that masterpiece”—now he leaned slightly toward the boy and glanced left and right, as if about to share a great secret—“the great masterpiece, in all of music, if you ask me. And yet, he never heard it performed himself.”
The boy did not speak, so Theodulf made a wide, crossing arc to stand at the starboard side of the revolving door, while the boy backed up against the one port.
“He was deaf, you see? All of that music, it only ever lived in his mind. Betwixt his ears, as it were!”
“But you’re not?”
What a candied voice he had!
“I’m not what?”
“Deaf, sir.” The boy cleared his throat now. It sounded less sweet when he continued. “You heard me from all the way down here?”
Theodulf giggled. A most unnatural sound from his twisted mouth. “No,” he said, putting a finger to his lips to repress that ridiculous laughter. “I was up in the Blue Room for the beginning of your performance.”
“But you left?”
“Too sweet a sound,” Theodulf said. “And in that den of thieves. I couldn’t bear the contradiction.”
“My uncle’s not a thief.”
Loyalty! What a noble thing for so young a man. “I believe he is not. My own father, to say nothing of the rest of them, is among the very worst of them all.” He caught and righted himself mid-confession. “But we’re free of them down here . . .”
Theodulf could not disguise his readiness. The boy was so simple. So naive. He felt a devilish grin rising and recognized at once how like his father he must have appeared in that instant. The thought of it filled him with disgust, and to erase it he glanced up and down Superior Street through the door. He could not see the top of the building across the street. The darkness was allayed only by the snow, which seemed possessed by a distant, strobic light. As lightning in a cloud. “No moon tonight,” Theodulf said, as much to himself as the boy. “Did you know Beethoven named it the Moonlight Sonata after spending an evening with his lover along the river Seine, under a radiant lune aux fraises?”
