Part 26 (1/2)

”Yes, sir.” Darian frowned at the piano music as if about to begin playing, positioning his fingers above the keyboard.

”-For once they guess how eager we are to please, and would lower ourselves to their brute capitalist level for mere money,” Professor Hermann continued, ”then we are lost, and the sacred cause of music is violated. Do you understand, mein Kind?”

I am not mein Kind. I am no one's Kind.

Even Bach, Mozart, Beethoven sold their music. Even a great genius must eat.

But Darian said nothing, and hurriedly fled into the opening measure of the great sonata.

SOON AFTER THIS, Darian Licht began earning small sums of money by way of music. He gave elementary instructions to several children of Academy teachers, including the Meeches' grandchildren; he played organ on Sundays at the Free Baptist Church of Vanderpoel; he was even hired for a wedding, at which he accompanied a busty local soprano who sang ”Make Me No Gaudy Chaplet” from Lucrezia, though he'd never set eyes on the piano music before. How easy it was to please an audience, to make people smile; yet how tempting, to strike disharmonic chords, to play for their appalled fascination Chopin's enigmatic first Prelude, or an arrhythmic, cacophonous little composition by Darian Licht! Yet he resisted. He was too needful of goodwill, and of the cash gifts that accompanied such goodwill. I will pay my own tuition, I will astonish Dr. Meech. I will astonish Father who has abandoned me.

Really, Darian didn't believe that Abraham Licht had abandoned him. Not yet.

It greatly helped Darian's reputation in the Vanderpoel area that he was a polite, sweet-tempered and delicately attractive youth, with distinct ”feminine” features; his eyes in particular, which were dreamy, thick-lashed and large as the brooding, mystical eyes of certain pre-Raphaelite portraits of androgynous beings of exotic beauty. Though he didn't believe himself shy, and was, in his heart, rather arrogant, he did give the impression of being shy; modest; uncertain; a youth with whom women might identify, and whom they might ”advance.” There was no need for Abraham Licht to have told his youngest son what Darian knew by instinct, that women will advance a young man to the degree to which he's ”talented”-that is, attractive to them, and no evident threat.

And none of this mattered, in any case, once Darian Licht sat down at the keyboard. Piano, organ-it didn't matter. A Steinway grand or a nameless American-made upright; the costly pipe organ in the Academy chapel or the wheezing foot-pedal organ at the Baptist church. Once Darian began to play, another more forceful personality took over. Is it I, Darian, or the music that speaks at such times? But what is ”I” apart from the music? Even when he played his own peculiar, gnarled compositions, it seemed to him that he was the mere instrument by which the music was given life; that it existed elsewhere on another grid or plane of being, frozen into silence as a statue is frozen; doomed to silence except for the accident of Darian Licht!

Of such paradoxes he'd have liked to speak with Adolf Hermann but in the past half year, since the Lusitania and the deepening of anti-German sentiment in the States, the older man had become increasingly doubtful about Darian's prospects for the future. As if Darian's future had anything to do with Germany's, or with Professor Hermann's own!-Darian bristled at the a.s.sumption. ”There is nothing for people like us except music,” Hermann would say, sighing, ”yet can there be 'music' without 'civilization'?”

Darian's impulse was to cry boldly Yes.

It wasn't any secret that Adolf Hermann's piano students were disappearing. Their parents, once so deferential and flattering, now cut him in the street. Even his neighbors who'd known him for years had turned cool, if not rude; the pharmacist, the local stationer, the greengrocer-of English descent-were openly hostile. An anonymous prankster desecrated his doorstep with HUN in black tar, and one afternoon while Darian was having his lesson, boys threw stones against the parlor windows, breaking several panes. Vanderpoel police weren't helpful, for they too were bigoted against all Germans, as Professor Hermann charged. What to do? Where to flee? Vanderpoel was his home, the United States was his country, for he'd broken all ties with Germany and was sickened to his soul by his homeland's war tactics, and could not countenance war in any guise most of all for imperial gain. ”My only hope-the only hope for civilization-is that the war will end soon and that Germany will make amends for all she's done, and be forgiven-”

The previous year, Adolf Hermann had been in a fever over the issue of Henry Ford's much-publicized peace s.h.i.+p, Oscar II, which had set sail for Europe in early December with the goal of paying $1 million to anyone in Europe who could stop the war. This was a proposal so insane, so vainglorious and childish in its a.s.sumptions and expectations there was, as Herman acknowledged, a kind of purity about it-”A native American spirituality.” For weeks Darian had to listen to Hermann's commentary on Henry Ford and the Oscar II and the absurdity of meddling with such an imperial world power as Germany; yet when the venture failed, and the Oscar II merely returned with its $1 million untapped and the great Ford himself sick, it was gloatingly reported by newspapers, with a severe head cold, Professor Hermann sank into a depression. ”I might have given aid to the cause instead of belittling it,” he said. ”I might have volunteered to go along as a German-speaking American citizen-but now it's too late. Darian, it's too late.”

More distressing, Professor Hermann was growing increasingly eccentric as a piano teacher.

Because of his ranting monologues, when he finally roused himself to teach, it was late; and so the lessons ran later, and later; beginning at midafternoon, they might stretch into evening; and Darian would miss dinner. Sometimes the older man would insist upon Darian playing the ”Pathetique” from start to finish, no matter his errors; sometimes he'd slam a fist down on the keyboard and lecture the frightened boy on the spot, when Darian's playing displeased him. For there was a way in which Beethoven's sonatas must be played, and numerous ways in which they must not be played. It was Adolf Hermann's belief that a Teutonic sensibility was required to fully comprehend Beethoven; no Frenchman, for instance, could play Beethoven correctly. So it infuriated Hermann when Darian played Beethoven, or Bach, or Mozart, or Schubert, in a style not Teutonic; in any case in a style that differed from Hermann's own, which he demonstrated for Darian. ”Are you not 'Licht'? Are you not one of us, boy, despite your 'American' birth?” he once cried.

There were days when Darian could do nothing right, and days when his playing moved the elder man to tears. ”So beautiful. So delicate. And the thrumming power beneath. And yet you'll betray me one day, Darian-I know.” And the warm heavy hand cupped Darian's shoulder in fond, clumsy reproach.

It was Darian's belief that a musical composition even by the greatest of composers could be interpreted in any number of ways by any number of performing artists. Depending upon any number of factors: chance, intuition, the hour of the day, the weather, the whim of the performer and the whim, even, of the instrument . . . he'd imagined a composition to be t.i.tled ”Broken-Stringed Piano & Warped Fiddle.” A technically complex piece, yet it would make listeners laugh! (Though not Adolf Hermann. He wouldn't be quite the ideal listener.) Dreaming in his cla.s.ses, gazing out whichever windowpanes were in view, Darian theorized that music need not be solemn just because ”serious” music has usually been solemn; why couldn't it be as robust, as hearty, as noisy, as rousing as military parade music, or the untrained Baptist choir, or the blacksmith shouting at a horse, or the blacksmith's very bellows? There was a hissing pneumatic sound of the steam radiator in his bedroom that fascinated his ear; and the drip-drip-drip drip drip-drip-drip of a faucet, both rhythmic and unpredictable; the slow, then accelerated tap-tap of Abraham Licht's fingers on a tabletop that betrayed his private feelings even as his smiling mask of a face hid all. America was a lively symphony of automobile horns, horses' whinnies, roosters' crowing, laundry flapping in the wind; what a stifling tradition to expect that every note of a composition must be played in the same sequence, or at the same tempo, or even in the key in which the composer had written it. ”And what of silence, the white margins at the edge of the notes?” Darian wondered, thrilled with his own audacity.

To Professor Hermann, however, there were two ways of playing music: correctly (that's to say, the way he played it) and incorrectly.

So with the ”Pathetique.” Darian was to play it at a rapid, even, measured clip; with a thunderous pa.s.sion as marked; abrupt pianissimo as marked; a not-overly-slow adagio cantabile; a precisely measured tempo throughout so that the dazzling runs were perfectly executed. It was necessary to maintain absolute evenness of tempo just as the metronome on the Bsendorser kept perfect time with never a hairsbreadth of a variation. Idiosyncratic variations in rhythm and tone were verboten though an innocent wrong note now and then didn't greatly matter. (In fact when Professor Hermann played, Darian noticed that he struck any number of wrong notes without pause or embarra.s.sment.) ”Why can't there be more freedom in music, Professor Hermann?” Darian once asked, ”-I mean more play in the matter of music?” and Professor Hermann said with a snort, ”Because music is not play.”

These long, exhausting lessons left the older man too weary to see Darian to the door. So Darian let himself out of the dim-lit house after having fetched a bottle of schnapps for Professor Hermann from the sideboard in the parlor. ”Mein Kind, you've drained all the strength from me,” Hermann said with a wheezing sigh. ”It is my pleasure, and my curse.”

A FEW DAYS before the recital, Darian played for Professor Hermann a new composition, a miniature sonata as he called it, t.i.tled ”Wors.h.i.+p.” (He didn't tell his teacher but the piece was dedicated to his mother.) An eight-minute variation on a theme out of the final movement of the Beethoven sonata, it consisted of m.u.f.fled chords, single notes struck and held high in the treble and low in the ba.s.s while a thin, hesitant, trickling sort of melody, an inversion of Beethoven's, made its way slowly across the keyboard like something overheard. With a bowed head, his chin creased against his chest, Adolf Hermann listened to this without comment; then, with a shrug of his shoulder, commanded Darian to play the piece another time. This, Darian did. The second time through, his fingers were more a.s.sured. He felt a thrill of excitement, antic.i.p.ation. True, the ”miniature sonata” didn't follow much of a formal structure; it slipped in and out of the key of F-sharp minor; and didn't resolve itself but faded out mysteriously into silence, in such a way that a listener might not realize it had ended. At the conclusion of the second playing of ”Wors.h.i.+p,” Professor Hermann said with a cruel smile, ”Darian. A tour de force. An 'American Pathetique'-ja? Wonderfully compressed and brief-but not brief enough.”

Darian flushed with hurt. He would have risen from the piano and gathered his things and left, but Professor Hermann said quickly that he was only joking-of course. A boy composer shouldn't be so thin-skinned.

”Tell me what has led you to compose such a thing? Such a-bold and experimental piece of music? Will you?”

Darian said tonelessly that he'd written ”Wors.h.i.+p” the other night, when he'd been unable to sleep; he'd been thinking of the Beethoven sonata almost ceaselessly, and was beginning to feel stage fright about Sunday. In a state of nerves, excitement rather than worry, he'd jotted down this composition for piano which was meant to suggest the singing of a boy and his younger sister in memory of their lost mother. The scene takes place in midsummer at dusk, in the country, at the edge of a vast marsh. Sometimes the boy sings alone, in the ba.s.s; sometime the girl sings alone, in the treble. They can't be heard distinctly because of the intervention, through memory, of the Beethoven sonata, and because they're singing across distance and time. A wind is rising. Already it's autumn. Their voices are blown away. Tall gra.s.ses are rippling, a stream runs nearby. All these sounds are part of the wors.h.i.+p. Because the lost mother is dead, she can't reply; though she tries to reply, hearing her children singing. ”Her silence, though, is a special silence,” Darian said. ”It isn't just emptiness. It can be heard.” At the piano, he played several full, deep chords; left the keys depressed for a beat of several seconds; then slowly raised them.

Almost, she might be beside me. Even here.

Touching my hair, my neck. Darian, I love you.

There was a commotion out on the street, raised voices and a dog barking, and Adolf Hermann tensed, looking toward the window. But the danger, if it was danger, pa.s.sed.

”That, too, could be part of the 'Wors.h.i.+p,'” Darian said. ”The dog barking especially-I like that.”

Adolf Hermann s.h.i.+fted his bulk in his chair and declared the lesson finished for the afternoon.

That was all: finished for the afternoon.

He told Darian please to see himself to the door, after fetching for him, from the sideboard, the bottle of schnapps and a fresh gla.s.s.

Harmony and disharmony. a.s.sonance and dissonance.

Why not both?: Why not everything?

Darian foresaw that his piano lessons with Adolf Hermann must soon end. But he wouldn't be prepared for the terrible way in which they ended two months later.

On the morning of 4 February 1917, the day after President Woodrow Wilson was to sever diplomatic relations with Germany, and hardly a week after Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare in neutral waters, Adolf Hermann would be found hanging by his neck from a beam in the cellar of his house; his face so distorted, it wouldn't appear human but b.e.s.t.i.a.l; his reddened eyes bulging from their sockets in a look of astonishment and horror. His suicide would be more a vexation and an outrage than a tragic, or even a pitiable, event, for his landlord and the other tenants of the row houses would be shocked and disgusted by it, and feel little sympathy for the dead man. A neatly written note in German, left on a nearby table, would be torn to bits by the landlord, whose misfortune it was to discover the body.

Why had he torn up the note?-Darian Licht would ask the man, stricken with grief; only to be told that, since the note was ”unreadable, in some sort of code,” it might be dangerous.

The rumor was, through Vanderpoel, that Adolf Hermann of Dsseldorf, Germany, had been a secret sympathizer with the German war effort, possibly even a practicing German spy.

”Bravo! Brav-vo!”

On the evening of 8 December 1916, in Frick Hall, Adolf Hermann rises to his feet (ironically? sincerely? in a spirit of play? in a gesture of boldness?) to lead the enthusiastic applause for young Darian Licht, who has performed Beethoven's ”Pathetique,” or a shortened version of it, with much feeling and precision. If he hasn't struck many wrong notes, if he's maintained a perfect tempo throughout, no one except a very few individuals knows; but everyone agrees he's a brilliant pianist-”And so young.”

Adolf Hermann, though invited to the soiree to follow, disappears into the crowd with the alacrity and grace of, not a heavyset middle-aged man in a bulky overcoat, but a cat. Abraham Licht has never appeared at all, so far as Darian knows.