Nemesis

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  Nemesis

  Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith

  for Emory and Georgia Elliott

  It is not my fault if I am like a mushroom which seems edible but which poisons you if you pick it up and taste it, taking it to be something else.

  —CHOPIN, in a letter, 1839

  Part I

  1

  Years later, looking back to that occasion, Maggie Blackburn would not have wished to pose the question to herself, whether, knowing what would come of it—all that would come of it—she would have given that party, on that particular date, and invited those particular guests.

  For circumstances are all, and circumstances determine fate as, on a certain level of perception, a concatenation of minutes constitutes a life, relentless as middle C struck endlessly—no music, merely sound.

  No. Maggie Blackburn, a person of the highest integrity, would not have wished to pose the question.

  2

  Maggie Blackburn was a transparency to herself but something of an enigma to others. Of this fact she had not the slightest suspicion.

  At the age of thirty-four she lived alone: unmarried, seemingly unattached. She was a gifted pianist yet, fatally, she lacked confidence in her abilities and had chosen to direct most of the energy of her young adulthood into teaching: first at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, then, for the past six years, at the Forest Park Conservatory of Music in Forest Park, Connecticut. Administrative work bewildered and fatigued her, yet she found herself accepting more and more of it and had recently been appointed director of the Music Education Program for Advanced Students, a position no one wanted, yet certain of her colleagues resented it being offered to her. They murmured to one another, not quite meaning it, “Who would have thought that Maggie Blackburn was ambitious—for such a petty sort of power?” Maggie was tall, five feet ten, and carried herself in a forthright manner that was mistaken for pride, when in truth it was a continual rebuke to her instinctive desire to shrink, to slouch, to make herself less visible; for she’d grown to her full height by the age of sixteen, and the terror of her life, at that time, was that she might never stop growing. Her mother, who had died of cancer when Maggie was still in high school, had often regarded her with loving yet worried eyes, and Maggie could not fail to detect a note of tense maternal solicitude in her voice: “Maggie, you are pretty. But you must stand up straight.” Of course, Maggie was not pretty.

  By the age of thirty, however, she seemed to have grown at last into her bones and to have acquired an austere, Nordic sort of beauty, a beauty that largely escaped her own eye. She did not see herself and had no vanity. Conscious of so much else, and warmly if haphazardly empathic with others, she seemed dispossessed of a consciousness of herself. Her hair was a rapidly fading gold and would have fallen nearly to her waist, but of course she wore it up, neatly plaited in girlhood braids and wound, not always neatly, about her head, coronet-fashion. In public, at the piano, in a long black dress, her hair so fashioned, she did look striking—but that was not, perhaps, her intention. In fact she had no intention at all; she supposed herself in the service of the music, “her” music only by grammatical usage. She seemed not exactly sexless but unaware of her sex, still less her sexuality, like a beautifully executed sculpted figure whose folds of stony clothing overlaid merely stone.

  There did indeed seem to be something wrong with Maggie Blackburn, but what? And who would save her from it?

  Like many music-minded people she had a tendency, at times, to become abstract: distracted. Certainly her slender, tapered fingers, like any pianist’s fingers, often depressed the keys of an invisible keyboard; but in a fiercely musical community like Forest Park, such mannerisms were hardly considered eccentricities. Maggie Blackburn, perhaps because she was a woman—and after all she was a woman, unmarried, seemingly unattached—was perceived as less professionally committed than her male colleagues, even those colleagues who were less talented than she; it was believed that she must, for all her pose of independence and self-assurance, hope to marry, or at least to fall in love.

  But she dressed so strangely or, if not strangely, unimaginatively. Tasteful clothes, though not many of them—a single good suit in dove-gray tweed, crisp shirtwaist dresses interchangeable except for color, linen slacks that fitted her loosely but had perfect creases, Icelandic wool sweaters, a cashmere coat so well worn at the cuffs it might well have been (indeed, it was) a remnant from college days: all in neutral colors, gray, black, off-white, soft dull beiges, greens so pebbly-pale as to be indistinguishable from gray. “Maggie Blackburn dresses like a nun,” one or another of her friends observed. “Can’t anyone make some suggestions to her?” Her closest friend, Portia MacLeod, a teacher of voice at the Conservatory and the school’s most distinguished female singer (soprano), had several times taken Maggie shopping, a schoolgirl sort of expedition both women had enjoyed, but the lovely reds, yellows, blues, and lavenders of those expeditions were rarely seen afterward. When Portia demanded where her new clothes were and why she wasn’t wearing them, Maggie could only reply haltingly, “I do wear them—I have. I’m sure I have.” Portia supposed her friend hopeless but did not intend to give up on her.

  Maggie did frequently wear eye-catching jewelry, inherited by way of her mother and her mother’s family. (They were Swedes who had emigrated to the United States in the 1880s, settling in northern Minnesota.) These finely wrought items were so clearly valuable they did not fail to signal to observers the possession of wealth in their bearer, or a familial connection to it. In fact, like so much else about Maggie Blackburn, this was quite erroneous: the Blackburns were near-destitute, for Maggie’s father’s protracted dying had exhausted all their savings and more. By the time Maggie was in her early thirties the Blackburns as a family had virtually ceased to exist.

  Maggie Blackburn had been named after a beloved young aunt who died of leukemia years before Maggie was born: by all accounts a gentle, saintly, beautiful girl. The original Margaret Louise Blackburn was only nineteen at the time of her death, a pianist and a harpist, blessed also with a “crystalclear” soprano voice, and though she had died six years before Maggie’s birth she was kept alive in the family as a touchstone, a presence, a theme. Maggie had grown up as an embodiment of that theme, for she too was musically talented, but she was a lesser embodiment, of course—how, being dead, could the original Margaret Louise be surpassed? It was as if the ghostly aunt were living and the living girl were a kind of ghost. Maggie told herself scrupulously that she did not mind how, in praising her piano playing, her father was clearly remembering the other Margaret Louise, that beloved older sister; she told herself that praise after all is praise. Love is love.

  By the age of fifteen she had articulated these insights:

  If I cannot be loved as myself, I can be loved as another.

  If I cannot be loved even as another, I have, in any case, the piano.

  She was wise enough to think of it not as my but the.

  Maggie won a scholarship to the Boston Conservatory of Music and after graduation made her professional debut, like so many other young pianists, in the Carnegie Recital Hall; she was taken up by kindly elders, who perceived in her a genuine if narrow talent, and no threat to them or to the music—decidedly not atonal, iconocla
stic, “experimental”—to which they had given their lives. Indeed there was, and is, a revolution in music, but it is possible to live as if there were not; as if Debussy, Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Bach, even Vivaldi were our contemporaries, speaking to an unchanged world. Small but appreciative audiences applauded young Margaret Louise Blackburn’s playing of familiar and semifamiliar piano pieces because it confirmed what they already knew: great music is beautiful, and technically demanding.

  Thus, Maggie embarked upon a career as an occasional soloist, a more frequent accompanist; she taught here and there, was given an instructorship at Curtis, then hired, as an assistant professor, at the Forest Park Conservatory, where she acquitted herself well, was much admired by her students, and held in generally high esteem by those colleagues who troubled to think of her at all. She was, in a community sometimes split by rival factions, dominated by prominent individuals (foremost among them the composer-in-residence Rolfe Christensen), a good, reliable citizen, an unattached woman who might be expected to give more of her time, her extracurricular time, than other faculty members. “Let’s ask Maggie Blackburn to chair this committee,” her colleagues said. “No one can do as good a job as Maggie.” And so it was.

  Maggie worked hard, and harder still, though not long after joining the Forest Park staff she began to disappear weekends. Where was she going? Why was she cutting back on her solo performances? Friends inquired, and Maggie murmured vaguely, “Visiting relatives,” and changed the subject. Or, if pressed, “Research.” Her expression was chill; her eyes invited no further scrutiny. It was remarked that she drove away in her metallic-gray Volvo with a single suitcase in the back seat and a stack of music, papers, and magazines in the seat beside her. Women acquaintances speculated—might there be a romantic mystery?—but, on Mondays, those colleagues who saw Maggie at school remarked on her air of distraction, melancholy. If there was love, it was not flourishing. It was not a healthy love.

  In fact, Maggie was visiting her father, a patient in a nursing home in suburban Long Island. She left Forest Park on Saturday morning, stayed overnight in a motel near the nursing home, and returned early Sunday evening. Matters were complicated in Maggie’s relationship with her father because he had been estranged from the family for years: he’d divorced Maggie’s mother when Maggie was thirteen; he’d remarried and redivorced and now, in his final illness, had settled into a defensive attitude toward his actions, maintaining old quarrels of which Maggie was grateful to know nothing. These complications were enhanced because Mr. Blackburn confused times and quarrels and seemed as emotionally involved with relatives long since gone as with those only recently deceased. Moreover, he believed himself financially independent, at times as mythically wealthy as Nelson Rockefeller and Howard Hughes (both of whom he claimed to know), when in fact he was, except for barely adequate insurance payments and Maggie’s support, penniless. Such a state of affairs had to be kept secret from him, to prevent another “cerebral episode”; thus, entering the room Mr. Blackburn shared with a Mr. Ackley, a fellow stroke victim, Maggie never knew who she was supposed to be or which era of Mr. Blackburn’s past she represented. When he stared at her and demanded, “Is it you?” she hardly knew how to answer.

  Daughter and father at such times regarded each other over an abyss of sticky linoleum.

  Mr. Blackburn had been successively a trial lawyer in Manhattan; an assistant district attorney; a judge. He’d had a wide and combative circle of acquaintances, a manly and, over all, gratifying career; and he did not accept that it was ended. He was seventy-nine years old, which was not, he argued, old. Age is a matter of mental ability, not physical debility. True, he was partly paralyzed; true, the vision in both his eyes had deteriorated; he suffered from spells of agnosia—total forgetfulness and incoherence—and was subject to an array of tics, twitches, spasms, stammerings. He considered Maggie’s role in his confinement a betrayal. He considered the nursing home—a private home in Old Westbury that was in fact his own choice—a preposterous but temporary place he had no need to take seriously. Thus, he ignored the moribund Mr. Ackley, who suffered from severe aphasia in any case, and kept himself aloof from the nursing staff, spending much of his time in a sullen, stony silence. On good, more active days he listened to music (Bach, Vivaldi, Palestrina; Maggie brought him tapes); worked on elaborate jigsaw puzzles spread out on a card table (fussy reproductions of Old Master oils which, too, Maggie supplied); scribbled notes, sometimes in code, in preparation for writing his life’s story. Mr. Blackburn’s mental life was, as his doctor told Maggie, a shifting in and out of coherence—coherence being a kindly word for sanity—and it was not a phenomenon Mr. Blackburn could control or for which he was responsible.

  Maggie came to Old Westbury on weekends. Not every weekend, but most. She brought this strange elderly accusing man who was her father chocolates, flowers, magazines, news of her life and her career, should he be in a receptive mood. Sometimes he was, and sometimes he was not. No one was responsible. Maggie understood that when she was not present to her father, she ceased to exist for him. Perhaps this was best. When she was present, smiling and speaking in a loud, unnatural voice so that he could hear her, she did exist—but how? In which category? He confused her with her mother and perhaps with her aunt Margaret Louise. Perhaps with other women. Did he perceive her, through his gauzy vision, as simply female? Mr. Blackburn was a judge still, with many questions to ask of Maggie: “Where did you say you were living? What is your life? Teaching? Teaching what? Where is your husband? Did he leave you? Where are your children? Why are you here? When are you going to take me home? What do you want of me?” In the lucidity of his madness Mr. Blackburn struck Maggie as an embodiment of that monstrous wisdom of which, in archetypal form, Shakespeare’s King Lear is so famously the embodiment; the elderly, doomed men shared a common theme.

  And Mr. Blackburn in one of his excited, raving states much resembled popular likenesses of Lear, hair white as churned froth, noble face creased, and lapidary, mad eyes shining with a basilisk’s glare. Maggie the smiling visitor, the hopeful and dutiful daughter, was sometimes stopped dead in her tracks.

  After several such visits, when the strain was nearly unbearable, Maggie found herself unaccountably afoot, walking, walking aimlessly, in unfamiliar surroundings—urban, semi-rural. Was she in Old Westbury? In Mineola? In a neighboring suburb of Forest Park? Where? And why? Once she woke to the tinny but terrifying clatter of a beer can rolling across pavement in her direction, tossed from a speeding car amid boys’ derisive yells: she was walking along a busy highway, at early evening, in an area of fast-food restaurants and gas stations. It was a windy autumnal day: a plait of her hair had come undone; her face was damp with tears. She stumbled drunkenly, though she was not drunk, and there was a smear of grease on her coat sleeve. Waking in quick startled degrees she took charge of herself—You are all right, you are going to be all right—and managed to locate her Volvo parked behind a Roy Rogers restaurant a mile behind her. Driving back to Forest Park and to her quiet home, to the Cape Cod cottage on Acacia Drive, Maggie Blackburn recalled her father’s doctor’s carefully chosen words: These are not matters we can control or for which we are responsible.

  She did not designate these fugues of forgetfulness as “blackouts,” as if the very term, suggestive of alcoholism, were a blow to her pride. Nor did she think of them as amnesiac spells, though of course they were. Her strategy in dealing with them, as, over the years, she dealt with minor or seemingly minor physical problems (a pea-sized lump in a breast? an odd ringing in the ears? constipation? diarrhea? migraine? or were these all her imagination?), was simply not to think of them, to give no name to them. The frightening amnesiac spells were swallowed up in a larger ocean of amnesia.

  And no one need know. Not about any of it.

  Because she did not want pity from her friends, or even an intrusive sort of sympathy, Maggie Blackburn chose not to tell anyone about her father; thus the mystery of her wee
kend disappearances. She had no idea that people speculated and would have been astonished to learn that they did.

  At the time of her father’s death, in May 1986, Maggie was seeing a man named Springer, Matt Springer: a Forest Park businessman who was divorced, in his mid-forties, a self-professed avid lover of music. She chose not to tell Matt Springer about her father either, for she was not certain of his feelings for her, or of her feelings for him. He was an attractive man, and seemingly good-tempered. It was not clear whether his divorce had shaken him or restored a portion of his youth to him. He’d been impressed with a piano recital Maggie had given at the Conservatory and subsequently made her acquaintance. His first words to her were both romantic and aggressive: “How beautifully you play Chopin, Miss Blackburn! And how beautiful you are!” Matt Springer had the air of a man who requires marriage, at least as a matter of identity and pride.

  Yet he was, too, the sort of man whose interest in a woman escalates in inverse proportion to her accessibility; and though Maggie did not know this, inexperienced as she was, not with men, precisely, but with coolly analyzing their motives, she quickly realized that, if she presented herself available on a certain date, Springer’s response was guarded and tentative; and if she presented herself as unavailable, Springer’s response was one of curiosity, even hurt. “But I’d hoped to see you on Saturday,” he would say. “Where are you going?”

  Was he considering marriage? There had been intimacies of a kind between them. They were, in a way, lovers; in other ways, not. For much went unspoken, including information about Matt Springer’s ex-wife and three children, and Maggie could not after all interrogate her friend as her father so briskly interrogated her.

  To Matt Springer, Margaret Louise Blackburn the concert pianist, this tall, slender, self-assured woman who wore her silvery-blond hair in so studied and elegant a style, Margaret Louise Blackburn of the prestigious Forest Park Conservatory of Music, represented an ideal, even an iconographic image: a woman whom, were she his wife, other men could not fail to covet. She was not pretty, but she was beautiful; she was not conventional in any way, but she was wholly reliable in her “womanly” moods, never emotional, any more than Matt Springer was emotional, and never demanding—unlike the overly eager and self-betraying “eligible” women of a divorced man’s acquaintance.