June 3, 2006--Saturday Story: "The Music Library"--Concluded
The Music Library
It may come as a surprise to find him spread out with the full score to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony in the Barnard College Music Library, considering that at his elementary school graduation, because he was tone deaf and thus would throw his classmates off key, Mrs. Novick, during rehearsal and in front of the entire graduating class, in a voice that had the capacity to shatter egos as well as glass, admonished him to lip-synch the words to the National Anthem and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
You might therefore be further surprised to find him poring over that hundred page score since when his brother was attempting to learn to play the violin, he insisted that he practice his scales in their shared clothes closet with the door shut tight, so, he said, as not to hear “that scratching.” Although, in truth, if Jasha Heifitz were practicing in that bedroom, to our musically-impaired hero, it too undoubtedly would have sounded like noise.
So what was he doing there with those rock-hard Bakelite headphones crushing his protruding ears, looking for all the world like a code breaker, while in fact he was attempting to decipher the orchestrations as if he were Bruno Walters’ apprentice with the Chicago Symphony, whose version of the Brahms he was attempting to absorb and understand? He had already mastered the pronunciation of the maestro’s name. “Valter,” “Valter,” he had been muttering to himself. Certainly not Walter. Obviously not.
Now he was attempting to hear, not just listen to this great and tragic work in E Minor. He felt prepared to take on this challenge as he was sufficiently tutored by then to know that the Fourth Symphony stands or falls upon the flute solo in the last movement, allegro energico e passionato, where, in the words of one of his professors at Columbia College across the street, “It stands for all the pleading, hopeful, gentleness and innocence in the world.”
Though he had as yet no idea whatsoever what was meant by “E Minor” or allegro, for other reasons soon to be revealed, including why he was at the Barnard rather than the Columbia library, he was at least making some progress on the passionato part.
This time he was alone at the library, not as he usually was with his roommate, Jerry Tabor, from the musical family of the same name. His father, the scion, presided over Friday evening cultural sessions in the Tabor den, which our Brahms enthusiast occasionally joined, along with the three Tabor boys, all in a clutch at the banker pere’s feet close by the tomb-sized mahogany Capehart phonograph as Koussevitzky conducted Mozart’s 29th or Toscanini his version of The Pastoral.
This was in truth an accomplished family--one brother played the piccolo and went on to assume the second chair dedicated to that tiniest of instruments in the Saint Louis Symphony under the direction of the esteemed Walter Susskind; the other, bulkier brother played the tuba, and had at that time had what he called a “night job” playing in the house orchestra of the Mark Hellinger Theater where My Fair Lady was near the end of its run, under the direction of someone whose name he had difficulty remembering. This job, which though it had the advantage of keeping his days free to pick up occasional gigs recoding advertising jingles, also had the concomitant potential disadvantage of relegating him to the status of official family disgrace. That is if Jerry hadn’t, in a remarkably restrained form of sibling rivalry, preempted that role by having chosen to become a pre-med, even though he was reputed to have the best of the Tabor ears.
One would think in such a family, it needs to be said, a Jewish family, a father would have been equally proud of a piccilost and a budding cardiologist much less an oldest son who schlepped around a tuba to make a living, but with the Tabors (ne Trayberg) that was not the case.
And thus when they were clustered at the phonograph to listen to music, it was blood sport.
Knowing this, and to lower the expectations and pressure he placed on himself, transgressive Jerry Tabor, with his unique sense of humor, renamed himself and encouraged his classmates to call him Jerry “Tuba.” But for anyone else at Mr. Tabor’s side those evenings, the pressure and expectations were intense as he fired off to this half-minion questions about Opus this and Opus that. This pressure was felt especially by Jerry’s tin-eared roommate because his musical education to that point was from the little he had acquired while listening to the Make Believe Ballroom on the radio, where each afternoon Martin Block played the latest songs to join the Hit Parade. Mona Lisa, right then, being at the top of the charts.
Jerry’s roommate, fellow freshman and pre-med, was eager to join the Tabor brothers in the den’s carefully maintained gloom, huddled on the Persian rug, by the fretted fireplace as if gathered by an ancient hearth, surrounded by deeply carved hardwoods and tapestries, because he was in the process of imaging a future for himself similar to that of the Tabors’, where he too would have a fieldstone house on a full acre of land on Long island, on the North Shore of course, replete with an identical faux-Norman mead-hall den. And he knew that in order to achieve that he needed to take on the Tabors’ manners and style and culture, none of which were a part of the curriculum at Columbia or available at his parent’s apartment in Brooklyn.
Thus, he called upon Jerry to teach him the rules of that game, and to learn what after all was an Opus. He knew that meant, among many other things, that it was time for him to move on from Eddie Fisher to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. One of Mr. Tabor’s favorites.
And so, after returning from his third Friday evening with Jerry Tuba’s family, from his birthday savings, he bought for his dorm room a portable mahogany-stained RCA HiFi and three long-playing albums—Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, Opus 43, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto In D, Opus 35 and Schubert’s Symphony Number 8, the Unfinished Symphony (no Opus but, mysteriously labeled D.759), the words to which he had memorized in order to fix it in his mind for the Music Appreciation test everyone needed to pass in order to graduate from P.S. 244:
This is the symphony,
the symphony
that Schubert wrote
but never finished . . .
* * *
Lessons with Jerry got off to a miserable start, with Jerry telling him that his choice of albums revealed just how massive the reclamation project was. There was very little to be learned, he was unceremoniously informed, from all of that “sentimental glop.” Those being Jerry’s exact words.
When he managed to squeak back a modest protest, telling Jerry that the Schubert was Mrs. Novick’s favorite at P.S 244, though they had never gotten to listen to anything but the first five minutes of the first movement, Jerry snarled at him, “We need Bach, we need Mahler we need some quartets. Beethoven for certain. “Something late. You need to get to know the 16th, the F major, especially the Lento—‘Es muss sein!, it must be!’” This was beginning to feel like something soaring beyond his expectations. He was alarmed that he would also have to learn Italian and even German? Lento, Es muss sein? He had Inorganic Chemistry and Introduction to Physics to worry about, not to mention his struggles with the Humanities and Contemporary Civilizations courses.
“Actually Jerry, I was thinking if I could learn just a little. You know, I have all my labs to do. And crew practice. What I really want is to be able to get the right answer when you father asks me a question about an Opus or something.”
With a shrug of feigned despair, Jerry sighed, “All right, we can do that.” But then showing an unexpected hint of understanding and compromise he added, “And if you insist on something Romantic, we can at least have Brahms.” But still unable to restrain himself, “Something other than that schmaltz you bought.” Sounding very much like Mr. Tabor, Jerry Tuba continued, “If I’m going to turn you into someone I can walk around campus with, we need to get to Sam Goody’s immediately and buy you something substantial, something we can sink our teeth into, something profound.”
Though he had not been seeking profundity, just to be able to appreciate a few pieces in their entirety without having to make up words to sing to remember them, and to get through an evening in that den without humiliating himself, reaching for his coat, he asked Jerry, “Will you come to Goody’s with me? I want to get the right records.”
With a wink, Jerry said, “As long as I don’t have to be seen walking with you.”
So in a few minutes, they could be seen, arm-in-arm, bent into the wind rising from the Hudson, striding across campus between the university’s twin libraries, Low and Butler, toward Broadway and then down into the subway, heading south toward the heart of the City.
Thus he set off in pursuit of the rest of his higher education.
* * *
The next afternoon, after chem lab, with a fierce rain slamming a staccato on the copper roof of their dorm room aerie under the eaves of Hartley Hall, Jerry and his musical ward sat leaning into the HiFi speakers as the second movement of the Schubert wove it schmaltzy spell. In spite of his rant of the day before, Jerry’s overnight thought was that it was best to start with theme-and-variation and that a good pedagogical strategy was to begin with something familiar, something anchored in childhood memory—something even from Mrs. Novick’s Music Appreciation class. And so Schubert it was. Words and all, especially since they represented the principal theme of that movement that then goes on to be varied, seemingly, to Jerry, unenduringly, endlessly.
“This,” he lectured from his chair, “is the basic building block of much classical music—theme-and-variation. And after you have mastered that we can move on to subtler things, turning eventually to the inner structures of symphonic and chamber music—how composers orchestrate their work. For this we will, of course, need to have their actual scores before us. It will not be enough to just listen—we will also have to see and read their actual musical notations”
“But Jerry, I told you how I can’t carry a tune much less a theme and how I was told not to sing at my graduation. I’m getting hives at the thought of looking at sheets of music. Actually, the start of a migraine.”
“Not to worry, you will see that though I do not play an instrument or read music I can follow a score. And with my help you as well will be able to.”
“But your father says you have the best ear in the Tuba family. My ear isn’t even a tin one, though maybe tin foil.”
Jerry didn’t even smile at this little joke he was so intent on his lesson, “Just sit still and listen, they are about to recapitulate the theme. If you must, sing the words. You know them. But please,” he added, after all he was a Tabor, “sing them to yourself.”
* * *
After a scant two weeks, theme-and-variation had been mastered to the extent, remarkably, that he who had needed to learn the art of lip-synching five years ago could now find both the themes and their myriad twisted and involuted variations in even the Es muss sein F Major Quartet in F Major, Number 16, Opus 135.
It was therefore time, Jerry felt, to go to the scores—to seek the inner structures. This though meant they would have to disinter themselves from Hartley Hall where they had holed up to where the scores were kept—the Columbia College Music Library.
“It’s time,” Jerry said, “You are ready.” He could sense his pupil’s building anxiety. So in his most sensitive mode he added, “You will be fine. I will guide you.” This proved to be assurance enough.
“But do you still have that pipe?”
“Yes. It’s on my desk.”
“Get it,” he commanded. “Take it along. And the beret?”
“It’s in the closet.”
“Put it on. You’ll need it.”
“Need it? In the library? For looking at the scores?”
“Because there may be Barnard girls there. Comparative literature or philosophy and perhaps even music majors. No offense, but I want you to look as if you belong.”
It was clear to him that Jerry too was feeling some trepidation. About being there with him. So he took the beret off its hook, plopped it on his head, and turned, forcing a grin, to show Jerry. “No not that way! Let me show you.” Stifling any appearance of exasperation, the maestro pulled on it so hard when adjusting it that it felt as if he might yank out hanks of hair. “Like this. Not in the center of your head with your hair sticking out, but forward and tipped to the side. Let me do it.” He tugged at it again, “Didn’t you ever see Breathless?” His pupil remained silent and Jerry knew his tolerance was being tested, “Of course not.” He could not resist adding soto voce, “I can’t believe how deprived you are.”
When everything was in preferred alignment and Jerry was thus satisfied that they were ready be seen together, with pipe clenched tightly between his teeth and beret pitched at an angle that would have made Jean-Paul Belmondo proud, unlike the last time they skulked across campus together, Jerry was now pleased to be out with his prodigy, in full sunlight. And even if he still couldn’t carry a tune, he had become a theme-and-variation maven! That was something. And he looked the part, attractive at six-feet-four alongside Jerry’s plump five-seven. A virtual arm piece!
* * *
The Music Listening Room was housed in Butler Library, a marble monolith named for former Columbia President Nicholas Murray (“Miraculous”) Butler--advisor to seven American presidents; Nobel Peace Prize recipient; and famous on campus for many glorious things, including the widely emulated undergraduate Great Books curriculum and the establishment, in the 1920s, of a strict quota limiting the number of Jewish students who would be admitted and thus allowed to rummage around in Aeschylus much less Spinoza. He did not want his University overrun by that tribe! How delicious then, how ironic for these two now to be descending into the bowels of this eponymous library in search of the inner Brahms.
And how reciprocally ironic then, as if they were still not welcome in Butler’s book mausoleum, that the score of the Brahms’ Fourth had been sent on interlibrary loan across Broadway to the Barnard Music Library.
Jerry, never one to be perturbed by irony or disappointment, said to his sulking charge, “Not a problem,” adding, while pointing at the beret, “In fact, over there you will be able to put that disguise to better use.”
So they came back up into the open air and side-by-side headed west toward the River. For them to get a head start on what they would be doing once they checked out the score, eager to emulate Socrates, whose peripatetic style they were just then learning about while reading The Symposium with the great Moses Hadas, Jerry spoke, while they were on the move, about the Brahms:
“In its instrumentation, which we will work together to understand when we have the notations at last before us, while of course at the same time listening to the record, we will find that in its basic outline of four movements--the first fast, the second slow, the third a scherzo, and the finale--it has the appearance, just the appearance of the more conventional classic and romantic symphonies we have already been studying—the Mozart, the Beethoven.”
Jerry stopped them for a moment to turn so they faced each other, to emphasize the magic they would soon experience. He grabbed hold of both of his pupil’s shoulders to rivet him in place and thereby secure his gaze and attention, “But within that structure which is now so familiar to you, you will discover, with my help of course, a profoundly original dialectic at the center of Brahms’ musical language.”
Though he knew it would not be until next year, when they got to Kant and then Marx that he would know what a “dialectic” was, he nonetheless understood that Jerry was initiating him into something profound, something, if he had understood last semester, that one of his professors had referred to as hermeneutic. With the Brahms as text!
Jerry again took up the pace as they approached Broadway. “But then, ah, we arrive at the last movement. Where everything comes together and Brahms’ achievement is secured--that finale. It is in the ancient form of a passacaglia--a series of I believe thirty, truly thirty variations on a single, merely one sparse theme. That should be red meat for you so to speak,” he said with a chuckle while slapping him affectionately on the back, almost hugging him, “You know almost as much as I about how this works!” For the first time they did feel like equals—so much was the power of theme-and-variation.
“And if you listen for it very carefully, though in your case, considering your limitations,” so much for equality, “you may not hear it--though I will be certain to show it to you in the score itself--the theme from the first movement wondrously reappears. Can you imagine that?”
In truth he could not—he had developed only the capacity to hear one theme at a time, which he immediately forgot when moving on to the next. He would for certain require the score, and Jerry by his side.
Undeterred, Jerry was so transported by the anticipation of this inter-movement wonder, that he hummed the theme to him as they crossed Broadway, forgetting for the moment that it was unlikely to be heard by that afflicted ear. To anyone noticing Jerry’s barely moving lips so close by that ear, it would have looked as if it was the prelude to a lover’s furtive kiss.
Thus so blindly enraptured were they that they did not notice the careening taxi which nearly sideswiped them. The driver, leaning from his window, leering at them, and screamed, “You assholes!" As they approached the stylish new Barnard library, they could hear him roaring with ribald laughter as he screeched north toward Harlem.
* * *
The score was there, having arrived from Butler. It was waiting to be picked up by the Barnard student who had reserved it, and so the librarian allowed them to check it out with the understanding that they would relinquish it at once (that was underlined) when she arrived, and that they would sit opposite her desk at the long open table in the central atrium of the Music Library. Though it was unspoken, it was understood that this latter requirement was so she could keep an eye on them, suspecting that they might run off with it. It was the era, after all, of Panty Raids and the end of quotas. Sunlight, if not trust, poured in on them.
Again side-by-side, now sprawled out with the huge score book between them and with their earphones jacked in the sockets built into the side of the table, Jerry directed him to cover just one ear with his set so he could be heard in the other as he walked him through the text, pointing out how each of the instruments had its own line of music. If one wanted to see where the oboes entered, all that was needed was to track along with the musical notations assigned to them. And above and below that oboe line could be found others for the violins, the celli (he noted, as with everything else, how careful Jerry was to emphasize the Italian plural), and even the tiny piccolo (would they be piccoli?).
It wasn’t as difficult as he had imagined to see and keep up with the mix of instruments printed in the score, even though the first movement was marked Allegro, fast, cheerful. And he began to think that he was also hearing that blend in his left ear, the inner structure.
But before they could turn the page to the second movement, the “moderate” Andante, he sensed a commotion at the librarian’s desk. Jerry had as well and was clearly more interested in what was transpiring there than the score, the recording, or his charge.
“I told you, Miss. von Hauptmann,” the room filled with an imperious voice, “we have the score. Actually, they have it,” the music librarian was pointing toward them without deigning to look their way, “I let them look at it with the proviso that they would give it back immediately when you called for it, and so there is no need for you to be in such a huff.” And still not turning toward them, she snapped her fingers in their direction and uttered just one word, “Score!"
Ordinarily, in this kind of hierarchical circumstance, Jerry would have blanched and reacted more as a Tabor than a Tuba, and his response would have trumped Miss. Van whatever-her-name’s. Actually, reverberations from that Tabor explosive huff would easily have been felt up in Rockland County where Columbia’s Lamont Lab kept track of the seismic aftershocks of the world’s earthquakes. It would have registered on the Richter Scale of privilege.
But gathering the score, seemingly almost meekly, Jerry got up from his chair, true still somewhat regally, under total, surprising control. He could be seen uncorking himself to his full inconsiderable height; and as he approached the desk, and Miss. von Hauptmann, it would have been difficult not to notice, though she hadn’t turned, that she towered over him by at least a head.
And it would not have been difficult to notice that that was quite some head—massively, radiantly blonde (revealed in the Barnard sunlight to be naturally blonde), with a jaw line and a nose so etched that they both looked as if they could be use for that purpose—etching.
There was to be no more Brahms, in fact no more Jerry. Because he disappeared, trailing behind this Rhine Maiden, this Valkyrie and did not surface, because that is literally what he did three weeks later—surface--until just before finals, all of which he promptly failed.
* * *
When he reappeared, he was first seen framed in the light streaming through the doorway of the West End Bar where his former ward was perched on a stool, staring forlornly into his beer, thinking about what might have become of his musical mentor. He had not heard a word from Jerry and had understandably not been eager to call his father or brothers for fear that something tragic had occurred.
The light behind Jerry outlined a decidedly slimmer silhouette. Uncharacteristically, since he was not known to have passed up any, it was clear that he had missed many meals. And he had not been shaving. With his trimmer shape, through his stringy beard even cheekbones were making an appearance. It would be an exaggeration to say that he had become angular—it is enough to note that there were signs of cartilage within what had previously been a decidedly fleshy nose. Further, it is significant to mention that Jerry was sporting a beret of his own. Of course it was situated on his head at just the right pitch. In a word, he had been transformed
Without explanation or prologue, he sat down on an adjacent stool; and in medias res, as if he had never been away, reached out his now thinner hand to touch his astonished friend and promptly began his narrative, which he repeated twice, almost word for word, like some ancient mariner’s rime to his gallant, during the week before he disappeared for good:
“Our third night was magical. She slept glistening in moonlight as we lay naked, beneath her bedroom window with its endless views across the Jersey flats to where the glacier paused before retreating northward.”
It was as if a hush descended upon the bar, “She had tossed the blanket to the floor. I lay there, staring at her, her body dwarfing mine, marveling at her perfect whiteness. As those hours passed, I relived what we had just done, what she had given me. And how I miraculously found myself there next to Sigrid.”
Johnny the bartender had silently slipped a Guinness to Jerry—his regular drink--but it sat on the bar untouched. Jerry continued to stare straight ahead, as if whispering to the air in the room.
“She is a baroness, Sigrid. From an ancient line of nobility, lesser nobility but aristocrats nonetheless. Her brother is first violist in the Berlin Philharmonic. Under von Karajan.” Jerry may have lost a few pounds but he was still Jerry Tabor. “And her mother was one of Germany’s leading equestrian riders. I saw pictures of her in the 1936 Olympics, also in Berlin. Now she paints. Landscapes. There are two in Sigrid’s parlor. Both of approaching storms. She says like the van Ruisdaels in the Met.”
Jerry paused, peering into the depth of the room as if to glimpse those Dutch landscapes hovering in the cigarette smoke rising from the booths at the rear, “After I followed her out of the Music Library, as if pulled along in her magnetic field,” Jerry was considering majoring in Physics, “she allowed me to come up beside her and we walked in step for hours, until dusk, along the river, through Riverside Park.” His companion could not help but think about what an effort it must have been for him to walk in stride with the towering Sigrid.
“She told me about her life as a girl during the War. I told her that the Second World War was one of my great interests, which it truly is. I have studied every battle. I know the name of every General Officer in the German army. It and music are my two obsessions.” His roommate could testify to that. “And Sigrid remembered how with her brother she was relocated to the country, to escape the bombing, to Alsace, where the only thing she recalls eating were turnips. The sight of which today makes her ill.” Jerry chuckled since every in the student dining hall knew that turnips were his favorite. “I told her that my father was in the air force and might have been on missions over Berlin. How this was a connection, a bond between us.”
For the first time he turned toward the friend who sat beside him, but still as if talking to himself continued, “Later that night in her apartment on Riverside Drive we drank claret and she undressed me as we slowly emptied the bottle. So slowly that it took at least an hour. The wine was wonderful, full of the aroma of summer berries.
“I was ashamed of how I looked at that time,” he confessed, pulling himself up straighter as he recalled his previous form, emphasizing the that time, “and I was thankful that the room was lit only with candles, the scent of which, mixing with that from her glorious body was intoxicating.” Jerry’s eyes looked as if they were sightless as he peered off into space seeking the recollection.
His friend on the other hand made a considerable effort to visualize all the intoxicating, literal details, especially those of the gloriously naked Sigrid. From what he had glimpsed of her that day in the library he thought it would be well worth the effort.
Jerry then muttered, “But I came in her hand as soon as she reached to touch me.”
“Oh my, too bad,” his bar mate said, thinking about the glories that Jerry had fumbled away—too much wine, too much time being undressed. A deadly combination.
“Not at all,” Jerry smiled, “since that was just the first of three times that night!” Did he then add a clumsy wink? It was difficult to verify since his innocent gallant was still distracted by the image that he was at last able to conjure of statuesque Sigrid by candlelight.
He knew that in dealing with such delicate subjects, etiquette required him to wait for Jerry to resume; but he so craved more images that he couldn’t stop himself from gasping, “Three times? I never knew you, I mean anyone could do that!” Getting better control of himself, he added, now in command of this remarkable fact of physiology, pre-med studies were paying off, “I get it--you must have stayed up until at least two in the morning.”
Radiating more self confidence, which he stoked by stroking his now tightened midsection, Jerry this time with an artful wink half boasted, “Well it is true that we did stay up all of that first night, but we did it again three times the next. And even managed to get some sleep!”
And there Jerry ended, needing to bolt. He was to meet Sigrid in half an hour but promised to return to the West End the next day at the same time to complete the story.
* * *
It was, though, not until two days later that Jerry showed up. His roommate in excited anticipation had been there, set up at what had become his regular stool at the horseshoe end of the bar, an hour before Jerry had said he would return. But he had waited in vain over many beers for many hours. As if on a vigil. But no sight of Jerry. Neither at the West End nor the dorm. He had been shuttling between both, darting back and froth across Broadway.
Perhaps there had been some confusion about Jerry’s plans. The thought of Jerry having Sigrid three times each night was so impossible for him to assimilate that it would be understandable if he were mixed up about something as mundane as a schedule. In fact, the eager gallant was so discombobulated that he had forgotten to go to his own chem lab final and would need to arrange a make-up. Though that was the last thing on his mind as he prowled the streets outside the West End all the next day and afternoon. Where was Jerry and what else had happened with Sigrid? He sensed it had been something so dangerously wicked that he wanted to know, needed to know all that Jerry would be willing to reveal.
Which would have to be everything!
Just as he was about to give up and drag himself back to Hartley Hall, after downing a few quick beers to drown his disappointment, he spotted Jerry bounding up the steps of the 116th Street subway station. He raced right over to the bar, bolted through the door, and hopped up onto his stool, catching his breath. Though even trimmer than two days ago he was still far from fit. Johnny was right there with Guinness and ice water, both of which Jerry drained.
Again, as if without pause, he picked up the narrative of his nights with Sigrid, “We even managed to get some sleep that second night. Then the next day we walked the full length of the Park, alongside the Hudson. It was radiant. Entwined in each other’s arms,” his eyes were glistening. “Sigrid began to tell me the story of her life in Germany. During the war. How she and her brother had been sent to the countryside, to be safe, to avoid the bombing of Berlin which had intensified. They lived with a family of framers who grew cabbages and turnips. She knew nothing of such natural things and was eager to help in the fields. She was so young, so untouched by the tragedy and violence around her that in many ways for her it was an idyllic time.”
Though in other circumstances his companion would have been interested in this eyewitness-to-history report, under these circumstances he was eager for Jerry to move on, to get them back to New York, to yesterday, to Sigrid’s apartment, high above the river. Back to her bedroom, to her bed beside the window—with its views and the moonlight.
Jerry sensed this restlessness, “I know this is not what you want to hear. I will tell you about that tomorrow.” They both knew what “that” meant. “I have just a few minutes now. I am meeting Sigrid again. We are going to Carnegie Hall. The Philadelphia Orchestra is in town. As you might imagine, Ormandy is not my favorite, but Sigrid loves their lush sound and tonality. So we are going. But I promise to tell you everything tomorrow. I will be here at four o’clock. Just for an hour,” his winking had continued to improve, “but I will be here.” And with that he was gone.
* * *
To help pass the time until the next afternoon and what hypnotic things Jerry would reveal, to keep his now unbridled excitement under some semblance of control, he wandered over to the Chemistry department and arranged for a make-up test. He was happy that it would be two days hence since he would need that much time both to recover from what Jerry would report in the afternoon and after that to do a little cramming so he could rescue at least a C+ grade. Without that there would be little hope of getting into a decent medical school.
After a nap that he desperately needed since images flickering in his mind of the entwined Jerry and Sigrid assured he would do little sleeping at night, he popped up refreshed and, after washing up in the communal shower down the hall, darted over to the West End at 3:30 to secure two stools for them in the most secluded spot at the bar. Well out of daylight. The best place in the bar to be sequestered, considering what he was about to experience.
But at 4:00, 4:15, and as late as 4:30 there was no Jerry. He had promised to be on time; he had said he had only an hour to tell his story before rushing back to Sigrid. Now at best there would be just minutes for all he needed to hear. Even Johnny seemed concerned. He hovered at the end of the bar nearest Broadway, arching over it to get the best view of the street as if keeping watch for Jerry.
Then right at 5:00 he materialized, looking battered. Collapsed back into his more familiar lump.
Without a look of acknowledgement he shuffled his way into the bar and slid into a booth by the front window. Apparently not noticing his former charge who had created that sheltered space for them in the back. Realizing that Jerry’s retransformation signaled some sort of trauma, his roommate left the hideaway and joined Jerry in the booth.
Again, as if no time had passed, Jerry picked up where he had left off the day before, “Then last night, just yesterday, after I left you, she showed me pictures from when she was in Alsace. From when she was sheltered there. With her brother. The violist. In the countryside. Of course they were all in black and white. The photos. But so vivid that I saw them as if in full color. In the gardens. Among the flowers. Always in light so bright that her white hair in ringlets seemed to outshine the sun.” He drank deeply of his Guinness, emptying it; and Johnny immediately brought him another. “She was three at the time,” he continued, “and even more beautiful than today. But always with a look of experience that put the lie to her years. As if she knew what was happening in the world and was already wounded by it. As from within, she thus emitted the only shadows visible. To see her that way was . . . . Innocence already shattered.” Jerry began to sob softly.
This was not at all what had been anticipated, or frankly needed. Jerry by now was supposed to be offering tantalizing snippets about touches and scents and Sigrid in moonlight and the intimate details of his explorations of her various perfect orifices. Crying in his stout was not to be the order of the day—that was to be reserved for discussions about other things, not lust.
“Then there were other photos. Of Sigrid years later, after the War, pictures of her in school, in the village where she went to live with her grandmother. It had not been destroyed so she was able to go to school there. There she was in her required uniform. Including a few in color. An enchanted life, but still she looked haunted. She told me what she had seen when she returned to Berlin from Alsace. The total destruction. Everything rubble. I have seen many pictures, films of that. But she told me about the thousands of people living, not just scavenging but living on great mounds of garbage. Mountains of waste. Clinging there to life. The fighting between those who fought and killed each other over scraps. Over an empty meat tin. Or a half-smoked cigarette. Which was currency. For them the war was not over. It had taken a more viciously intimate turn.”
His companion had by then long forgotten about Jerry and Sigrid’s nights and the three times, much less anything more erotic. It was his turn then to try to touch Jerry. Clumsily, since reaching out this way about something so overwhelming heinous was blessedly not something with which he had as yet had any experience. But he did manage to tap Jerry on the shoulder while making an awkward attempt to put his arm at least across his shoulders and perhaps even around his hunched back. To try to bring him some sort of comfort.
Thus half-embraced, Jerry continued, “Sigrid was fortunate to have a place to retreat to in Bavaria. With her grandmother. There were picture of her too. And still more of her family. Her mother on her horse and in competition. Even one of her in the Olympics. She did not win a medal.” He broke off there and drained another glass.
“There was also a picture of her father, Otto von Hauptmann. Just one. He was a baron. You know that.” Jerry peered at him looking for signs that he had remembered. He nodded that he had.
“It fell out of a sleeve in the back cover of a second album. I had noticed that there was a page where a photo was missing. The rest of the albums were so perfect. But here there were just the four glued-on corners that had held it in place. They were still affixed to that empty page.”
Jerry leaned so far across the table that there heads were nearly touching. His whisper thus could easily be heard. “You also know that I know everything about the War?” He nodded again in such an exaggerated way that their foreheads actually bumped together with a sharp snap. He ignored the pain. “I not only know all the battles and all the tactics but also all the major divisions and units and their assignments. Even those that never were in battle. So when I saw Otto von Hauptmann’s uniform, I knew immediately that he had been in the Waffen SS. And that his unit had been assigned to the camps, in Lithuania.” He stared up as if in a stupor at the fan rotating slowly above them.
“Sigrid’s father was an SS officer. Totenkopf—‘Deaths Head.’ Einsatzgruppen—‘Mission Groups’ Death Squads. I know them all. Her father. Hers.”
Jerry was stammering. “I knew his unit. I saw his insignias. The photo was that clear. And what they had done! He had done. Nothing but killings. The cruelest.” He laid his head cradled in his arms on the table.
They sat together for another hour, not exchanging a word. Just sitting together across the table, together but as if unaware of each other. Yet breathing in unison. That was their connection--it was biological
Johnny had taken a stool for himself at the far end and was contemplating the bottom of his own glass as if he had heard every word.
“Beasts!” Jerry spat after an hour of silence. “Sigrid’s father was that, a beast. I couldn’t look at her. It was of course not her fault. She had been just a child. An innocent. As innocent as his victims. But I could no longer be with her. She held onto me. Clinging. But she knew. More than I she knew it was impossible. I had lost people there. You lost people there.” More nodding.
“I had no choice. We had captured magic. Perhaps in part because of what her people, and mine too, had lived through. And how they had died. Even died together.”
Then Jerry looked directly at his friend and said, “Perhaps that had been a part of it--the magnetic attraction!” In spite of what he had experienced Jerry was still Jerry Tuba.
“I will never see her again. She will still be here, close by; but I will never see her again. I can’t. Never.”
After a moment, as that hung between them, Jerry added one final thing: it appeared to his friend to be a quote from some poem that they hadn’t yet studied in any of their required courses, “’He prayeth well, who loveth well.’”
And with that, for the last time in his gallant’s presence, Jerry lifted himself from the banquette, waved to Johnny, and went out onto deserted Broadway. With a final look back through the steamy West End window to his roommate, Jerry strode downtown, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his lumberjack coat and with his huge head thrust defiantly forward. Never again to be seen by his erstwhile charge.
Who knew he would be fine. Was certain he would be fine.
* * *
After the summer break, he returned as a sophomore, primed for a year of struggle with the college’s required courses in the history of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought. Kant was waiting for him.
He had been a construction worker and was feeling muscular and optimistic. Had exercised his mind as well as his body by going most evenings with his friend Nick Gutfeld to Lewison Stadium up by City College where the New York Philharmonic performed, as they said, “under the stars.” So in that way he had found a way to maintain his interest in music, looking forward, after the long days of physical labor, to sitting out in the sultry air and watching the great Pierre Monteux conduct. After these evenings, he also felt ready to resume his musical education back at Columbia. But on his own, without Jerry alas, who, since he was not registered, it was immediately apparent had not returned.
In truth, in Jerry Tabor terms, the Lewison Stadium repertoire was more “pops” than “long hair,” composed of liquid programs suffused with Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Vivaldi. Still enough of a challenge for him, however, since an occasional piece contained more examples of Sonata Form than theme-and-variation which he had already mastered. Thus there were things for him to learn even from Monteux, enough to motivate him not only to add to his growing shelf of LPs but also to think about the possibility of going once again to the Music Library in Butler, decidedly there, to see what might be found among the musical scores.
And so after getting launched in his new classes, a mix of humanities, social sciences, and a ramped-up slate of pre-med courses, with Organic Chemistry looming as an immediate nightmare, as a form of homage to Jerry, he took from its sleeve and placed on his turntable the Budapest String Quartet’s magnificent recording of the Opus 135—Beethoven’s final masterpiece. And after wearing out its grooves to the point where it was nearly impossible to separate the violins from the viola, he felt ready to venture forth to Butler. He was particularly interested in entering into some of the secrets of the final movement, mysteriously marked “Der schwer gefasst Entschluss.”
If he understood what the German-English dictionary he consulted was suggesting this meant that something, just what he wasn’t sure, was “difficult.” But he felt ready for that too since he knew that somehow it had to be related to what Beethoven had emphatically scrawled in the margin of the original manuscript--Es mus sein. What Jerry had taught him--that Beethoven asked if it must be and he had of course answered that it must, no matter how difficult. So what mus sein, must be difficult in this last movement of this last transporting quartet? That was the mystery he needed now to probe.
* * *
The Butler people had a copy of the Budapest recording and the score, which they seemed pleased to check out to him. From the label affixed to the inside cover it appeared that the last time anyone had requested it was fully five years ago, when he was lip-synching back at P.S. 244! He felt, therefore, as if he were venturing into unexplored and, he even hoped, dangerous territory.
He decided he would concentrate on that last movement. So, score in hand, he flipped through its pages to locate it, and immediately discovered there, printed alongside the musical notations, which in truth still looked like hieroglyphics to him, he saw printed, not scrawled, Muss es sein? “Must it be?” Right there beside the first, slow introductory chords. And then below that he pounced upon the more familiar Es muss sein! Which signaled the faster main theme that enfolds throughout the quartet’s remaining moments.
But try as he could, and he was making a great effort, pressing so hard on the headset that it felt as if his ears were on fire, though deeply stirred again by the grandeur of what Beethoven was able in his genius to evoke from just four stringed instruments, he could not hear what all who truly knew music, including Jerry, his father, and both of his brothers, he could not hear or understood why to them this piece, this movement was considered to be perhaps mankind’s single greatest achievement.
He felt crushed by inadequacy and slumped back against his chair, felled by a wave of depression. He let the earphones slip down his neck so that he heard the final shattering chords as if through the speakers of a cheap radio.
“You look so unhappy, so disconsolate. How can that be? I see what you have been listening to.” Her voice floated toward him as if out of a dream. He did not look up, but rather rocked forward and grasped his head in his hands as if crushed by a migraine.
“You are Jerry’s friend, are you not?” Still not looking up, he thought hers was a familiar voice, especially the slightly foreign syntax, the “are you not,” and the hint of an accent. Perhaps Austrian? His family was originally from Austria, and what he heard there in that superheated room in Butler’s basement was reminiscent of his Great Aunt Bessie’s way of speaking—both were elegant.
“That is a difficult piece, no?” She then pronounced “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss” so melodically that it sounded, as she spoke it, as if were part of the score.
It, of course, was Sigrid.
“Beethoven’s ‘difficult decision,’ you know. It is my brother’s favorite. He is a violist back in Berlin, where I was born. Did Jerry tell you that? About me? I am certain that he did. He was so fond of you. He called you his ‘baby brother.’ From Brooklyn he told me. I do not know Brooklyn.”
He was now looking up at her. And although the music library was lit with just the faint glow of lamps, she looked as if she was framed in sunlight.
Realizing that he would remember for the rest of his life literally everything he was about to try to do and say, he rose as gracefully as his lanky body would allow; and, in spite of the fear that he might choke himself, in a single sweeping gesture untangled himself from the headset and placed it on the table.
He felt with considerable relief that he had accomplished that successfully--he could still breathe, though barely. And with a pounding heart, when he was fully standing, he was intoxicated to notice that they were exactly the same height.
“Maybe one day you will,” he thought he heard her pronounce it vill, “perhaps one day you will show me Brooklyn, yes?”
It may come as a surprise to find him spread out with the full score to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony in the Barnard College Music Library, considering that at his elementary school graduation, because he was tone deaf and thus would throw his classmates off key, Mrs. Novick, during rehearsal and in front of the entire graduating class, in a voice that had the capacity to shatter egos as well as glass, admonished him to lip-synch the words to the National Anthem and The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
You might therefore be further surprised to find him poring over that hundred page score since when his brother was attempting to learn to play the violin, he insisted that he practice his scales in their shared clothes closet with the door shut tight, so, he said, as not to hear “that scratching.” Although, in truth, if Jasha Heifitz were practicing in that bedroom, to our musically-impaired hero, it too undoubtedly would have sounded like noise.
So what was he doing there with those rock-hard Bakelite headphones crushing his protruding ears, looking for all the world like a code breaker, while in fact he was attempting to decipher the orchestrations as if he were Bruno Walters’ apprentice with the Chicago Symphony, whose version of the Brahms he was attempting to absorb and understand? He had already mastered the pronunciation of the maestro’s name. “Valter,” “Valter,” he had been muttering to himself. Certainly not Walter. Obviously not.
Now he was attempting to hear, not just listen to this great and tragic work in E Minor. He felt prepared to take on this challenge as he was sufficiently tutored by then to know that the Fourth Symphony stands or falls upon the flute solo in the last movement, allegro energico e passionato, where, in the words of one of his professors at Columbia College across the street, “It stands for all the pleading, hopeful, gentleness and innocence in the world.”
Though he had as yet no idea whatsoever what was meant by “E Minor” or allegro, for other reasons soon to be revealed, including why he was at the Barnard rather than the Columbia library, he was at least making some progress on the passionato part.
This time he was alone at the library, not as he usually was with his roommate, Jerry Tabor, from the musical family of the same name. His father, the scion, presided over Friday evening cultural sessions in the Tabor den, which our Brahms enthusiast occasionally joined, along with the three Tabor boys, all in a clutch at the banker pere’s feet close by the tomb-sized mahogany Capehart phonograph as Koussevitzky conducted Mozart’s 29th or Toscanini his version of The Pastoral.
This was in truth an accomplished family--one brother played the piccolo and went on to assume the second chair dedicated to that tiniest of instruments in the Saint Louis Symphony under the direction of the esteemed Walter Susskind; the other, bulkier brother played the tuba, and had at that time had what he called a “night job” playing in the house orchestra of the Mark Hellinger Theater where My Fair Lady was near the end of its run, under the direction of someone whose name he had difficulty remembering. This job, which though it had the advantage of keeping his days free to pick up occasional gigs recoding advertising jingles, also had the concomitant potential disadvantage of relegating him to the status of official family disgrace. That is if Jerry hadn’t, in a remarkably restrained form of sibling rivalry, preempted that role by having chosen to become a pre-med, even though he was reputed to have the best of the Tabor ears.
One would think in such a family, it needs to be said, a Jewish family, a father would have been equally proud of a piccilost and a budding cardiologist much less an oldest son who schlepped around a tuba to make a living, but with the Tabors (ne Trayberg) that was not the case.
And thus when they were clustered at the phonograph to listen to music, it was blood sport.
Knowing this, and to lower the expectations and pressure he placed on himself, transgressive Jerry Tabor, with his unique sense of humor, renamed himself and encouraged his classmates to call him Jerry “Tuba.” But for anyone else at Mr. Tabor’s side those evenings, the pressure and expectations were intense as he fired off to this half-minion questions about Opus this and Opus that. This pressure was felt especially by Jerry’s tin-eared roommate because his musical education to that point was from the little he had acquired while listening to the Make Believe Ballroom on the radio, where each afternoon Martin Block played the latest songs to join the Hit Parade. Mona Lisa, right then, being at the top of the charts.
Jerry’s roommate, fellow freshman and pre-med, was eager to join the Tabor brothers in the den’s carefully maintained gloom, huddled on the Persian rug, by the fretted fireplace as if gathered by an ancient hearth, surrounded by deeply carved hardwoods and tapestries, because he was in the process of imaging a future for himself similar to that of the Tabors’, where he too would have a fieldstone house on a full acre of land on Long island, on the North Shore of course, replete with an identical faux-Norman mead-hall den. And he knew that in order to achieve that he needed to take on the Tabors’ manners and style and culture, none of which were a part of the curriculum at Columbia or available at his parent’s apartment in Brooklyn.
Thus, he called upon Jerry to teach him the rules of that game, and to learn what after all was an Opus. He knew that meant, among many other things, that it was time for him to move on from Eddie Fisher to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. One of Mr. Tabor’s favorites.
And so, after returning from his third Friday evening with Jerry Tuba’s family, from his birthday savings, he bought for his dorm room a portable mahogany-stained RCA HiFi and three long-playing albums—Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, Opus 43, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto In D, Opus 35 and Schubert’s Symphony Number 8, the Unfinished Symphony (no Opus but, mysteriously labeled D.759), the words to which he had memorized in order to fix it in his mind for the Music Appreciation test everyone needed to pass in order to graduate from P.S. 244:
This is the symphony,
the symphony
that Schubert wrote
but never finished . . .
* * *
Lessons with Jerry got off to a miserable start, with Jerry telling him that his choice of albums revealed just how massive the reclamation project was. There was very little to be learned, he was unceremoniously informed, from all of that “sentimental glop.” Those being Jerry’s exact words.
When he managed to squeak back a modest protest, telling Jerry that the Schubert was Mrs. Novick’s favorite at P.S 244, though they had never gotten to listen to anything but the first five minutes of the first movement, Jerry snarled at him, “We need Bach, we need Mahler we need some quartets. Beethoven for certain. “Something late. You need to get to know the 16th, the F major, especially the Lento—‘Es muss sein!, it must be!’” This was beginning to feel like something soaring beyond his expectations. He was alarmed that he would also have to learn Italian and even German? Lento, Es muss sein? He had Inorganic Chemistry and Introduction to Physics to worry about, not to mention his struggles with the Humanities and Contemporary Civilizations courses.
“Actually Jerry, I was thinking if I could learn just a little. You know, I have all my labs to do. And crew practice. What I really want is to be able to get the right answer when you father asks me a question about an Opus or something.”
With a shrug of feigned despair, Jerry sighed, “All right, we can do that.” But then showing an unexpected hint of understanding and compromise he added, “And if you insist on something Romantic, we can at least have Brahms.” But still unable to restrain himself, “Something other than that schmaltz you bought.” Sounding very much like Mr. Tabor, Jerry Tuba continued, “If I’m going to turn you into someone I can walk around campus with, we need to get to Sam Goody’s immediately and buy you something substantial, something we can sink our teeth into, something profound.”
Though he had not been seeking profundity, just to be able to appreciate a few pieces in their entirety without having to make up words to sing to remember them, and to get through an evening in that den without humiliating himself, reaching for his coat, he asked Jerry, “Will you come to Goody’s with me? I want to get the right records.”
With a wink, Jerry said, “As long as I don’t have to be seen walking with you.”
So in a few minutes, they could be seen, arm-in-arm, bent into the wind rising from the Hudson, striding across campus between the university’s twin libraries, Low and Butler, toward Broadway and then down into the subway, heading south toward the heart of the City.
Thus he set off in pursuit of the rest of his higher education.
* * *
The next afternoon, after chem lab, with a fierce rain slamming a staccato on the copper roof of their dorm room aerie under the eaves of Hartley Hall, Jerry and his musical ward sat leaning into the HiFi speakers as the second movement of the Schubert wove it schmaltzy spell. In spite of his rant of the day before, Jerry’s overnight thought was that it was best to start with theme-and-variation and that a good pedagogical strategy was to begin with something familiar, something anchored in childhood memory—something even from Mrs. Novick’s Music Appreciation class. And so Schubert it was. Words and all, especially since they represented the principal theme of that movement that then goes on to be varied, seemingly, to Jerry, unenduringly, endlessly.
“This,” he lectured from his chair, “is the basic building block of much classical music—theme-and-variation. And after you have mastered that we can move on to subtler things, turning eventually to the inner structures of symphonic and chamber music—how composers orchestrate their work. For this we will, of course, need to have their actual scores before us. It will not be enough to just listen—we will also have to see and read their actual musical notations”
“But Jerry, I told you how I can’t carry a tune much less a theme and how I was told not to sing at my graduation. I’m getting hives at the thought of looking at sheets of music. Actually, the start of a migraine.”
“Not to worry, you will see that though I do not play an instrument or read music I can follow a score. And with my help you as well will be able to.”
“But your father says you have the best ear in the Tuba family. My ear isn’t even a tin one, though maybe tin foil.”
Jerry didn’t even smile at this little joke he was so intent on his lesson, “Just sit still and listen, they are about to recapitulate the theme. If you must, sing the words. You know them. But please,” he added, after all he was a Tabor, “sing them to yourself.”
* * *
After a scant two weeks, theme-and-variation had been mastered to the extent, remarkably, that he who had needed to learn the art of lip-synching five years ago could now find both the themes and their myriad twisted and involuted variations in even the Es muss sein F Major Quartet in F Major, Number 16, Opus 135.
It was therefore time, Jerry felt, to go to the scores—to seek the inner structures. This though meant they would have to disinter themselves from Hartley Hall where they had holed up to where the scores were kept—the Columbia College Music Library.
“It’s time,” Jerry said, “You are ready.” He could sense his pupil’s building anxiety. So in his most sensitive mode he added, “You will be fine. I will guide you.” This proved to be assurance enough.
“But do you still have that pipe?”
“Yes. It’s on my desk.”
“Get it,” he commanded. “Take it along. And the beret?”
“It’s in the closet.”
“Put it on. You’ll need it.”
“Need it? In the library? For looking at the scores?”
“Because there may be Barnard girls there. Comparative literature or philosophy and perhaps even music majors. No offense, but I want you to look as if you belong.”
It was clear to him that Jerry too was feeling some trepidation. About being there with him. So he took the beret off its hook, plopped it on his head, and turned, forcing a grin, to show Jerry. “No not that way! Let me show you.” Stifling any appearance of exasperation, the maestro pulled on it so hard when adjusting it that it felt as if he might yank out hanks of hair. “Like this. Not in the center of your head with your hair sticking out, but forward and tipped to the side. Let me do it.” He tugged at it again, “Didn’t you ever see Breathless?” His pupil remained silent and Jerry knew his tolerance was being tested, “Of course not.” He could not resist adding soto voce, “I can’t believe how deprived you are.”
When everything was in preferred alignment and Jerry was thus satisfied that they were ready be seen together, with pipe clenched tightly between his teeth and beret pitched at an angle that would have made Jean-Paul Belmondo proud, unlike the last time they skulked across campus together, Jerry was now pleased to be out with his prodigy, in full sunlight. And even if he still couldn’t carry a tune, he had become a theme-and-variation maven! That was something. And he looked the part, attractive at six-feet-four alongside Jerry’s plump five-seven. A virtual arm piece!
* * *
The Music Listening Room was housed in Butler Library, a marble monolith named for former Columbia President Nicholas Murray (“Miraculous”) Butler--advisor to seven American presidents; Nobel Peace Prize recipient; and famous on campus for many glorious things, including the widely emulated undergraduate Great Books curriculum and the establishment, in the 1920s, of a strict quota limiting the number of Jewish students who would be admitted and thus allowed to rummage around in Aeschylus much less Spinoza. He did not want his University overrun by that tribe! How delicious then, how ironic for these two now to be descending into the bowels of this eponymous library in search of the inner Brahms.
And how reciprocally ironic then, as if they were still not welcome in Butler’s book mausoleum, that the score of the Brahms’ Fourth had been sent on interlibrary loan across Broadway to the Barnard Music Library.
Jerry, never one to be perturbed by irony or disappointment, said to his sulking charge, “Not a problem,” adding, while pointing at the beret, “In fact, over there you will be able to put that disguise to better use.”
So they came back up into the open air and side-by-side headed west toward the River. For them to get a head start on what they would be doing once they checked out the score, eager to emulate Socrates, whose peripatetic style they were just then learning about while reading The Symposium with the great Moses Hadas, Jerry spoke, while they were on the move, about the Brahms:
“In its instrumentation, which we will work together to understand when we have the notations at last before us, while of course at the same time listening to the record, we will find that in its basic outline of four movements--the first fast, the second slow, the third a scherzo, and the finale--it has the appearance, just the appearance of the more conventional classic and romantic symphonies we have already been studying—the Mozart, the Beethoven.”
Jerry stopped them for a moment to turn so they faced each other, to emphasize the magic they would soon experience. He grabbed hold of both of his pupil’s shoulders to rivet him in place and thereby secure his gaze and attention, “But within that structure which is now so familiar to you, you will discover, with my help of course, a profoundly original dialectic at the center of Brahms’ musical language.”
Though he knew it would not be until next year, when they got to Kant and then Marx that he would know what a “dialectic” was, he nonetheless understood that Jerry was initiating him into something profound, something, if he had understood last semester, that one of his professors had referred to as hermeneutic. With the Brahms as text!
Jerry again took up the pace as they approached Broadway. “But then, ah, we arrive at the last movement. Where everything comes together and Brahms’ achievement is secured--that finale. It is in the ancient form of a passacaglia--a series of I believe thirty, truly thirty variations on a single, merely one sparse theme. That should be red meat for you so to speak,” he said with a chuckle while slapping him affectionately on the back, almost hugging him, “You know almost as much as I about how this works!” For the first time they did feel like equals—so much was the power of theme-and-variation.
“And if you listen for it very carefully, though in your case, considering your limitations,” so much for equality, “you may not hear it--though I will be certain to show it to you in the score itself--the theme from the first movement wondrously reappears. Can you imagine that?”
In truth he could not—he had developed only the capacity to hear one theme at a time, which he immediately forgot when moving on to the next. He would for certain require the score, and Jerry by his side.
Undeterred, Jerry was so transported by the anticipation of this inter-movement wonder, that he hummed the theme to him as they crossed Broadway, forgetting for the moment that it was unlikely to be heard by that afflicted ear. To anyone noticing Jerry’s barely moving lips so close by that ear, it would have looked as if it was the prelude to a lover’s furtive kiss.
Thus so blindly enraptured were they that they did not notice the careening taxi which nearly sideswiped them. The driver, leaning from his window, leering at them, and screamed, “You assholes!" As they approached the stylish new Barnard library, they could hear him roaring with ribald laughter as he screeched north toward Harlem.
* * *
The score was there, having arrived from Butler. It was waiting to be picked up by the Barnard student who had reserved it, and so the librarian allowed them to check it out with the understanding that they would relinquish it at once (that was underlined) when she arrived, and that they would sit opposite her desk at the long open table in the central atrium of the Music Library. Though it was unspoken, it was understood that this latter requirement was so she could keep an eye on them, suspecting that they might run off with it. It was the era, after all, of Panty Raids and the end of quotas. Sunlight, if not trust, poured in on them.
Again side-by-side, now sprawled out with the huge score book between them and with their earphones jacked in the sockets built into the side of the table, Jerry directed him to cover just one ear with his set so he could be heard in the other as he walked him through the text, pointing out how each of the instruments had its own line of music. If one wanted to see where the oboes entered, all that was needed was to track along with the musical notations assigned to them. And above and below that oboe line could be found others for the violins, the celli (he noted, as with everything else, how careful Jerry was to emphasize the Italian plural), and even the tiny piccolo (would they be piccoli?).
It wasn’t as difficult as he had imagined to see and keep up with the mix of instruments printed in the score, even though the first movement was marked Allegro, fast, cheerful. And he began to think that he was also hearing that blend in his left ear, the inner structure.
But before they could turn the page to the second movement, the “moderate” Andante, he sensed a commotion at the librarian’s desk. Jerry had as well and was clearly more interested in what was transpiring there than the score, the recording, or his charge.
“I told you, Miss. von Hauptmann,” the room filled with an imperious voice, “we have the score. Actually, they have it,” the music librarian was pointing toward them without deigning to look their way, “I let them look at it with the proviso that they would give it back immediately when you called for it, and so there is no need for you to be in such a huff.” And still not turning toward them, she snapped her fingers in their direction and uttered just one word, “Score!"
Ordinarily, in this kind of hierarchical circumstance, Jerry would have blanched and reacted more as a Tabor than a Tuba, and his response would have trumped Miss. Van whatever-her-name’s. Actually, reverberations from that Tabor explosive huff would easily have been felt up in Rockland County where Columbia’s Lamont Lab kept track of the seismic aftershocks of the world’s earthquakes. It would have registered on the Richter Scale of privilege.
But gathering the score, seemingly almost meekly, Jerry got up from his chair, true still somewhat regally, under total, surprising control. He could be seen uncorking himself to his full inconsiderable height; and as he approached the desk, and Miss. von Hauptmann, it would have been difficult not to notice, though she hadn’t turned, that she towered over him by at least a head.
And it would not have been difficult to notice that that was quite some head—massively, radiantly blonde (revealed in the Barnard sunlight to be naturally blonde), with a jaw line and a nose so etched that they both looked as if they could be use for that purpose—etching.
There was to be no more Brahms, in fact no more Jerry. Because he disappeared, trailing behind this Rhine Maiden, this Valkyrie and did not surface, because that is literally what he did three weeks later—surface--until just before finals, all of which he promptly failed.
* * *
When he reappeared, he was first seen framed in the light streaming through the doorway of the West End Bar where his former ward was perched on a stool, staring forlornly into his beer, thinking about what might have become of his musical mentor. He had not heard a word from Jerry and had understandably not been eager to call his father or brothers for fear that something tragic had occurred.
The light behind Jerry outlined a decidedly slimmer silhouette. Uncharacteristically, since he was not known to have passed up any, it was clear that he had missed many meals. And he had not been shaving. With his trimmer shape, through his stringy beard even cheekbones were making an appearance. It would be an exaggeration to say that he had become angular—it is enough to note that there were signs of cartilage within what had previously been a decidedly fleshy nose. Further, it is significant to mention that Jerry was sporting a beret of his own. Of course it was situated on his head at just the right pitch. In a word, he had been transformed
Without explanation or prologue, he sat down on an adjacent stool; and in medias res, as if he had never been away, reached out his now thinner hand to touch his astonished friend and promptly began his narrative, which he repeated twice, almost word for word, like some ancient mariner’s rime to his gallant, during the week before he disappeared for good:
“Our third night was magical. She slept glistening in moonlight as we lay naked, beneath her bedroom window with its endless views across the Jersey flats to where the glacier paused before retreating northward.”
It was as if a hush descended upon the bar, “She had tossed the blanket to the floor. I lay there, staring at her, her body dwarfing mine, marveling at her perfect whiteness. As those hours passed, I relived what we had just done, what she had given me. And how I miraculously found myself there next to Sigrid.”
Johnny the bartender had silently slipped a Guinness to Jerry—his regular drink--but it sat on the bar untouched. Jerry continued to stare straight ahead, as if whispering to the air in the room.
“She is a baroness, Sigrid. From an ancient line of nobility, lesser nobility but aristocrats nonetheless. Her brother is first violist in the Berlin Philharmonic. Under von Karajan.” Jerry may have lost a few pounds but he was still Jerry Tabor. “And her mother was one of Germany’s leading equestrian riders. I saw pictures of her in the 1936 Olympics, also in Berlin. Now she paints. Landscapes. There are two in Sigrid’s parlor. Both of approaching storms. She says like the van Ruisdaels in the Met.”
Jerry paused, peering into the depth of the room as if to glimpse those Dutch landscapes hovering in the cigarette smoke rising from the booths at the rear, “After I followed her out of the Music Library, as if pulled along in her magnetic field,” Jerry was considering majoring in Physics, “she allowed me to come up beside her and we walked in step for hours, until dusk, along the river, through Riverside Park.” His companion could not help but think about what an effort it must have been for him to walk in stride with the towering Sigrid.
“She told me about her life as a girl during the War. I told her that the Second World War was one of my great interests, which it truly is. I have studied every battle. I know the name of every General Officer in the German army. It and music are my two obsessions.” His roommate could testify to that. “And Sigrid remembered how with her brother she was relocated to the country, to escape the bombing, to Alsace, where the only thing she recalls eating were turnips. The sight of which today makes her ill.” Jerry chuckled since every in the student dining hall knew that turnips were his favorite. “I told her that my father was in the air force and might have been on missions over Berlin. How this was a connection, a bond between us.”
For the first time he turned toward the friend who sat beside him, but still as if talking to himself continued, “Later that night in her apartment on Riverside Drive we drank claret and she undressed me as we slowly emptied the bottle. So slowly that it took at least an hour. The wine was wonderful, full of the aroma of summer berries.
“I was ashamed of how I looked at that time,” he confessed, pulling himself up straighter as he recalled his previous form, emphasizing the that time, “and I was thankful that the room was lit only with candles, the scent of which, mixing with that from her glorious body was intoxicating.” Jerry’s eyes looked as if they were sightless as he peered off into space seeking the recollection.
His friend on the other hand made a considerable effort to visualize all the intoxicating, literal details, especially those of the gloriously naked Sigrid. From what he had glimpsed of her that day in the library he thought it would be well worth the effort.
Jerry then muttered, “But I came in her hand as soon as she reached to touch me.”
“Oh my, too bad,” his bar mate said, thinking about the glories that Jerry had fumbled away—too much wine, too much time being undressed. A deadly combination.
“Not at all,” Jerry smiled, “since that was just the first of three times that night!” Did he then add a clumsy wink? It was difficult to verify since his innocent gallant was still distracted by the image that he was at last able to conjure of statuesque Sigrid by candlelight.
He knew that in dealing with such delicate subjects, etiquette required him to wait for Jerry to resume; but he so craved more images that he couldn’t stop himself from gasping, “Three times? I never knew you, I mean anyone could do that!” Getting better control of himself, he added, now in command of this remarkable fact of physiology, pre-med studies were paying off, “I get it--you must have stayed up until at least two in the morning.”
Radiating more self confidence, which he stoked by stroking his now tightened midsection, Jerry this time with an artful wink half boasted, “Well it is true that we did stay up all of that first night, but we did it again three times the next. And even managed to get some sleep!”
And there Jerry ended, needing to bolt. He was to meet Sigrid in half an hour but promised to return to the West End the next day at the same time to complete the story.
* * *
It was, though, not until two days later that Jerry showed up. His roommate in excited anticipation had been there, set up at what had become his regular stool at the horseshoe end of the bar, an hour before Jerry had said he would return. But he had waited in vain over many beers for many hours. As if on a vigil. But no sight of Jerry. Neither at the West End nor the dorm. He had been shuttling between both, darting back and froth across Broadway.
Perhaps there had been some confusion about Jerry’s plans. The thought of Jerry having Sigrid three times each night was so impossible for him to assimilate that it would be understandable if he were mixed up about something as mundane as a schedule. In fact, the eager gallant was so discombobulated that he had forgotten to go to his own chem lab final and would need to arrange a make-up. Though that was the last thing on his mind as he prowled the streets outside the West End all the next day and afternoon. Where was Jerry and what else had happened with Sigrid? He sensed it had been something so dangerously wicked that he wanted to know, needed to know all that Jerry would be willing to reveal.
Which would have to be everything!
Just as he was about to give up and drag himself back to Hartley Hall, after downing a few quick beers to drown his disappointment, he spotted Jerry bounding up the steps of the 116th Street subway station. He raced right over to the bar, bolted through the door, and hopped up onto his stool, catching his breath. Though even trimmer than two days ago he was still far from fit. Johnny was right there with Guinness and ice water, both of which Jerry drained.
Again, as if without pause, he picked up the narrative of his nights with Sigrid, “We even managed to get some sleep that second night. Then the next day we walked the full length of the Park, alongside the Hudson. It was radiant. Entwined in each other’s arms,” his eyes were glistening. “Sigrid began to tell me the story of her life in Germany. During the war. How she and her brother had been sent to the countryside, to be safe, to avoid the bombing of Berlin which had intensified. They lived with a family of framers who grew cabbages and turnips. She knew nothing of such natural things and was eager to help in the fields. She was so young, so untouched by the tragedy and violence around her that in many ways for her it was an idyllic time.”
Though in other circumstances his companion would have been interested in this eyewitness-to-history report, under these circumstances he was eager for Jerry to move on, to get them back to New York, to yesterday, to Sigrid’s apartment, high above the river. Back to her bedroom, to her bed beside the window—with its views and the moonlight.
Jerry sensed this restlessness, “I know this is not what you want to hear. I will tell you about that tomorrow.” They both knew what “that” meant. “I have just a few minutes now. I am meeting Sigrid again. We are going to Carnegie Hall. The Philadelphia Orchestra is in town. As you might imagine, Ormandy is not my favorite, but Sigrid loves their lush sound and tonality. So we are going. But I promise to tell you everything tomorrow. I will be here at four o’clock. Just for an hour,” his winking had continued to improve, “but I will be here.” And with that he was gone.
* * *
To help pass the time until the next afternoon and what hypnotic things Jerry would reveal, to keep his now unbridled excitement under some semblance of control, he wandered over to the Chemistry department and arranged for a make-up test. He was happy that it would be two days hence since he would need that much time both to recover from what Jerry would report in the afternoon and after that to do a little cramming so he could rescue at least a C+ grade. Without that there would be little hope of getting into a decent medical school.
After a nap that he desperately needed since images flickering in his mind of the entwined Jerry and Sigrid assured he would do little sleeping at night, he popped up refreshed and, after washing up in the communal shower down the hall, darted over to the West End at 3:30 to secure two stools for them in the most secluded spot at the bar. Well out of daylight. The best place in the bar to be sequestered, considering what he was about to experience.
But at 4:00, 4:15, and as late as 4:30 there was no Jerry. He had promised to be on time; he had said he had only an hour to tell his story before rushing back to Sigrid. Now at best there would be just minutes for all he needed to hear. Even Johnny seemed concerned. He hovered at the end of the bar nearest Broadway, arching over it to get the best view of the street as if keeping watch for Jerry.
Then right at 5:00 he materialized, looking battered. Collapsed back into his more familiar lump.
Without a look of acknowledgement he shuffled his way into the bar and slid into a booth by the front window. Apparently not noticing his former charge who had created that sheltered space for them in the back. Realizing that Jerry’s retransformation signaled some sort of trauma, his roommate left the hideaway and joined Jerry in the booth.
Again, as if no time had passed, Jerry picked up where he had left off the day before, “Then last night, just yesterday, after I left you, she showed me pictures from when she was in Alsace. From when she was sheltered there. With her brother. The violist. In the countryside. Of course they were all in black and white. The photos. But so vivid that I saw them as if in full color. In the gardens. Among the flowers. Always in light so bright that her white hair in ringlets seemed to outshine the sun.” He drank deeply of his Guinness, emptying it; and Johnny immediately brought him another. “She was three at the time,” he continued, “and even more beautiful than today. But always with a look of experience that put the lie to her years. As if she knew what was happening in the world and was already wounded by it. As from within, she thus emitted the only shadows visible. To see her that way was . . . . Innocence already shattered.” Jerry began to sob softly.
This was not at all what had been anticipated, or frankly needed. Jerry by now was supposed to be offering tantalizing snippets about touches and scents and Sigrid in moonlight and the intimate details of his explorations of her various perfect orifices. Crying in his stout was not to be the order of the day—that was to be reserved for discussions about other things, not lust.
“Then there were other photos. Of Sigrid years later, after the War, pictures of her in school, in the village where she went to live with her grandmother. It had not been destroyed so she was able to go to school there. There she was in her required uniform. Including a few in color. An enchanted life, but still she looked haunted. She told me what she had seen when she returned to Berlin from Alsace. The total destruction. Everything rubble. I have seen many pictures, films of that. But she told me about the thousands of people living, not just scavenging but living on great mounds of garbage. Mountains of waste. Clinging there to life. The fighting between those who fought and killed each other over scraps. Over an empty meat tin. Or a half-smoked cigarette. Which was currency. For them the war was not over. It had taken a more viciously intimate turn.”
His companion had by then long forgotten about Jerry and Sigrid’s nights and the three times, much less anything more erotic. It was his turn then to try to touch Jerry. Clumsily, since reaching out this way about something so overwhelming heinous was blessedly not something with which he had as yet had any experience. But he did manage to tap Jerry on the shoulder while making an awkward attempt to put his arm at least across his shoulders and perhaps even around his hunched back. To try to bring him some sort of comfort.
Thus half-embraced, Jerry continued, “Sigrid was fortunate to have a place to retreat to in Bavaria. With her grandmother. There were picture of her too. And still more of her family. Her mother on her horse and in competition. Even one of her in the Olympics. She did not win a medal.” He broke off there and drained another glass.
“There was also a picture of her father, Otto von Hauptmann. Just one. He was a baron. You know that.” Jerry peered at him looking for signs that he had remembered. He nodded that he had.
“It fell out of a sleeve in the back cover of a second album. I had noticed that there was a page where a photo was missing. The rest of the albums were so perfect. But here there were just the four glued-on corners that had held it in place. They were still affixed to that empty page.”
Jerry leaned so far across the table that there heads were nearly touching. His whisper thus could easily be heard. “You also know that I know everything about the War?” He nodded again in such an exaggerated way that their foreheads actually bumped together with a sharp snap. He ignored the pain. “I not only know all the battles and all the tactics but also all the major divisions and units and their assignments. Even those that never were in battle. So when I saw Otto von Hauptmann’s uniform, I knew immediately that he had been in the Waffen SS. And that his unit had been assigned to the camps, in Lithuania.” He stared up as if in a stupor at the fan rotating slowly above them.
“Sigrid’s father was an SS officer. Totenkopf—‘Deaths Head.’ Einsatzgruppen—‘Mission Groups’ Death Squads. I know them all. Her father. Hers.”
Jerry was stammering. “I knew his unit. I saw his insignias. The photo was that clear. And what they had done! He had done. Nothing but killings. The cruelest.” He laid his head cradled in his arms on the table.
They sat together for another hour, not exchanging a word. Just sitting together across the table, together but as if unaware of each other. Yet breathing in unison. That was their connection--it was biological
Johnny had taken a stool for himself at the far end and was contemplating the bottom of his own glass as if he had heard every word.
“Beasts!” Jerry spat after an hour of silence. “Sigrid’s father was that, a beast. I couldn’t look at her. It was of course not her fault. She had been just a child. An innocent. As innocent as his victims. But I could no longer be with her. She held onto me. Clinging. But she knew. More than I she knew it was impossible. I had lost people there. You lost people there.” More nodding.
“I had no choice. We had captured magic. Perhaps in part because of what her people, and mine too, had lived through. And how they had died. Even died together.”
Then Jerry looked directly at his friend and said, “Perhaps that had been a part of it--the magnetic attraction!” In spite of what he had experienced Jerry was still Jerry Tuba.
“I will never see her again. She will still be here, close by; but I will never see her again. I can’t. Never.”
After a moment, as that hung between them, Jerry added one final thing: it appeared to his friend to be a quote from some poem that they hadn’t yet studied in any of their required courses, “’He prayeth well, who loveth well.’”
And with that, for the last time in his gallant’s presence, Jerry lifted himself from the banquette, waved to Johnny, and went out onto deserted Broadway. With a final look back through the steamy West End window to his roommate, Jerry strode downtown, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his lumberjack coat and with his huge head thrust defiantly forward. Never again to be seen by his erstwhile charge.
Who knew he would be fine. Was certain he would be fine.
* * *
After the summer break, he returned as a sophomore, primed for a year of struggle with the college’s required courses in the history of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought. Kant was waiting for him.
He had been a construction worker and was feeling muscular and optimistic. Had exercised his mind as well as his body by going most evenings with his friend Nick Gutfeld to Lewison Stadium up by City College where the New York Philharmonic performed, as they said, “under the stars.” So in that way he had found a way to maintain his interest in music, looking forward, after the long days of physical labor, to sitting out in the sultry air and watching the great Pierre Monteux conduct. After these evenings, he also felt ready to resume his musical education back at Columbia. But on his own, without Jerry alas, who, since he was not registered, it was immediately apparent had not returned.
In truth, in Jerry Tabor terms, the Lewison Stadium repertoire was more “pops” than “long hair,” composed of liquid programs suffused with Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Vivaldi. Still enough of a challenge for him, however, since an occasional piece contained more examples of Sonata Form than theme-and-variation which he had already mastered. Thus there were things for him to learn even from Monteux, enough to motivate him not only to add to his growing shelf of LPs but also to think about the possibility of going once again to the Music Library in Butler, decidedly there, to see what might be found among the musical scores.
And so after getting launched in his new classes, a mix of humanities, social sciences, and a ramped-up slate of pre-med courses, with Organic Chemistry looming as an immediate nightmare, as a form of homage to Jerry, he took from its sleeve and placed on his turntable the Budapest String Quartet’s magnificent recording of the Opus 135—Beethoven’s final masterpiece. And after wearing out its grooves to the point where it was nearly impossible to separate the violins from the viola, he felt ready to venture forth to Butler. He was particularly interested in entering into some of the secrets of the final movement, mysteriously marked “Der schwer gefasst Entschluss.”
If he understood what the German-English dictionary he consulted was suggesting this meant that something, just what he wasn’t sure, was “difficult.” But he felt ready for that too since he knew that somehow it had to be related to what Beethoven had emphatically scrawled in the margin of the original manuscript--Es mus sein. What Jerry had taught him--that Beethoven asked if it must be and he had of course answered that it must, no matter how difficult. So what mus sein, must be difficult in this last movement of this last transporting quartet? That was the mystery he needed now to probe.
* * *
The Butler people had a copy of the Budapest recording and the score, which they seemed pleased to check out to him. From the label affixed to the inside cover it appeared that the last time anyone had requested it was fully five years ago, when he was lip-synching back at P.S. 244! He felt, therefore, as if he were venturing into unexplored and, he even hoped, dangerous territory.
He decided he would concentrate on that last movement. So, score in hand, he flipped through its pages to locate it, and immediately discovered there, printed alongside the musical notations, which in truth still looked like hieroglyphics to him, he saw printed, not scrawled, Muss es sein? “Must it be?” Right there beside the first, slow introductory chords. And then below that he pounced upon the more familiar Es muss sein! Which signaled the faster main theme that enfolds throughout the quartet’s remaining moments.
But try as he could, and he was making a great effort, pressing so hard on the headset that it felt as if his ears were on fire, though deeply stirred again by the grandeur of what Beethoven was able in his genius to evoke from just four stringed instruments, he could not hear what all who truly knew music, including Jerry, his father, and both of his brothers, he could not hear or understood why to them this piece, this movement was considered to be perhaps mankind’s single greatest achievement.
He felt crushed by inadequacy and slumped back against his chair, felled by a wave of depression. He let the earphones slip down his neck so that he heard the final shattering chords as if through the speakers of a cheap radio.
“You look so unhappy, so disconsolate. How can that be? I see what you have been listening to.” Her voice floated toward him as if out of a dream. He did not look up, but rather rocked forward and grasped his head in his hands as if crushed by a migraine.
“You are Jerry’s friend, are you not?” Still not looking up, he thought hers was a familiar voice, especially the slightly foreign syntax, the “are you not,” and the hint of an accent. Perhaps Austrian? His family was originally from Austria, and what he heard there in that superheated room in Butler’s basement was reminiscent of his Great Aunt Bessie’s way of speaking—both were elegant.
“That is a difficult piece, no?” She then pronounced “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss” so melodically that it sounded, as she spoke it, as if were part of the score.
It, of course, was Sigrid.
“Beethoven’s ‘difficult decision,’ you know. It is my brother’s favorite. He is a violist back in Berlin, where I was born. Did Jerry tell you that? About me? I am certain that he did. He was so fond of you. He called you his ‘baby brother.’ From Brooklyn he told me. I do not know Brooklyn.”
He was now looking up at her. And although the music library was lit with just the faint glow of lamps, she looked as if she was framed in sunlight.
Realizing that he would remember for the rest of his life literally everything he was about to try to do and say, he rose as gracefully as his lanky body would allow; and, in spite of the fear that he might choke himself, in a single sweeping gesture untangled himself from the headset and placed it on the table.
He felt with considerable relief that he had accomplished that successfully--he could still breathe, though barely. And with a pounding heart, when he was fully standing, he was intoxicated to notice that they were exactly the same height.
“Maybe one day you will,” he thought he heard her pronounce it vill, “perhaps one day you will show me Brooklyn, yes?”
posted by Steven Zwerling at
3:02 PM
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