My Heart Laid Bare Read online

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

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

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

  So with the “Pathétique.” Darian was to play it at a rapid, even, measured clip; with a thunderous passion as marked; abrupt pianissimo as marked; a not-overly-slow adagio cantabile; a precisely measured tempo throughout so that the dazzling runs were perfectly executed. It was necessary to maintain absolute evenness of tempo just as the metronome on the Bösendorser kept perfect time with never a hairsbreadth of a variation. Idiosyncratic variations in rhythm and tone were verboten though an innocent wrong note now and then didn’t greatly matter. (In fact when Professor Hermann played, Darian noticed that he struck any number of wrong notes without pause or embarrassment.)

  “Why can’t there be more freedom in music, Professor Hermann?” Darian once asked, “—I mean more play in the matter of music?” and Professor Hermann said with a snort, “Because music is not play.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Almost, she might be beside me. Even here.

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

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

  “That, too, could be part of the ‘Worship,’” Darian said. “The dog barking especially—I like that.”

  Adolf Hermann shifted his bulk in his chair and declared the lesson finished for the afternoon.

  That was all: finished for the afternoon.

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

  2.

  Harmony and disharmony. Assonance and dissonance.

  Why not both?: Why not everything?

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

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

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

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

  3.

  “Bravo! Brav-vo!”

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

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

  Though he’d sent a card and flowers to Darian at the school, delivered the previous day and signed by both Your loving Father and Your loving sister Millie.

  Darian tells himself I didn’t expect them to come of course.

  Darian chides himself How could you imagine, you fool!

  Finding himself dazed with fatigue and exhilaration trundled into a motorcar outside the chapel, driven across town to the home of the Joseph Fricks, it’s Mrs. Frick who is their hostess, for Mr. Frick is away—“How Joseph would have admired your playing, Darian Licht! His favorite composer is Beethoven.” Darian doesn’t hear most of what is said to him; most of what is said to him is repeated, and repeated; how brilliant his “rendition”; how “handsome a figure” at the piano; is his family here?—“How proud they must be.”

  An elegant, enormous dining room. A buffet table so long its end can’t be seen. Servants in livery, impassive and deft. Glasses of sparkling champagne, cut-glass goblets and silver trays. The mezzo-soprano advances upon Darian to tell him he’s brilliant, and a handsome figure at the piano. Women friends of Mrs. Frick cluster near for they’ve been told (is it true? they don’t dare inquire) that the brilliant young pianist is an orphan, a charity pupil at the Academy. But won’t he eat? He must eat. He’s far too thin. Won’t he have a glass of champagne? Just one! Darian isn’t hungry, Darian’s nerves are tight as a piano’s strings, he can’t stop shivering, swallowing down a glassful of the surprisingly tart liquid that stings his nostrils, he recalls his sister Millie advocating Champagne! Champagne! for all the ills of the world, from the pocket to the heart to the brain. In a passionate voice that will tolerate no disagreement the mezzo-soprano praises young Darian Licht as a brilliant pianist in the style of the great Franz Liszt; there’s applause; Darian finds himself seated at his hostess’s piano, a gorgeous Bechstein that seems to float upon the rich wine-colors of the Indian carpet underfoot, his fingers aren’t stiff after the ordeal of the Beethoven sonata but come to life leaping along the keyboard in a merry rendition of “Chirping Crickets” complete with interventions from Bach and certain delicate passages of the “Pathétique” several ladies find so achingly beautiful they begin to feel faint; trailing off into allegro agitato, a whirlwind of notes improvised by Darian on the spot, the giddy confluence of a sixteen-year-old’s first taste of champagne and his first Bechstein and his first public applause that quite goes to his head. Smile and any fool will smile with you! Father cynically advised and it’s true, for Darian Licht has a sweet, shy smile, the ladies are taken with his smile, the way his fair brown flamelike hair glides forward across his brow, part-obscuring one of his eyes, the way he moves his slender, sinuous arms along the keyboard. Bravo! Brav-vo!

  Suddenly, Darian has had enough. He ceases playing. Rises from the beautiful piano. He isn’t rude, but he hasn’t time to be courteous. Must escape. These strangers with their glittering jewels and eyes pressing near. Can’t breathe, must escape. They draw back as he plunges past them not seeing them. Smile and any fool . . . Play piano to please the ear of any fool . . . “But no. No. I don’t want to play for fools. I will not.”

  Darian makes his way blindly through the crowded, festive rooms. Finds himself in a corridor, walking swiftly. A maze of a house. How can one escape? And how many miles is he from the Academy? Can he find his way back alone, in the harsh damp December wind, in the night? His eyes adjust to the dim light of the corridor and he finds himself studying what must be Frick family portraits; he’s staring at a portrait of . . . his mother? The name on the gilt plaque is SOPHIA ELIZABETH FRICK, the dates are 1862–1892. This young woman died eight years before Darian was born.

  “It’s her.”

  His lost mother not quite as he remembers her, of course. Though this is certainly the woman in the Muirkirk portrait locked away in Father’s room. Darian would know those large, lovely eyes anywhere that fix him with an expression of mock sobriety. Her dark hair is arranged in a fussier, more feminine style than in the Muirkirk portrait; here, instead of a smart riding habit, she’s wearing a white silk gown with a feather-fringed cape gracefully draped over her shoulders. Strands of pearls, white gloves to the elbow. Ivory-pale skin. Eyes given an eerie glisten by the artist—two tiny dots of white on the irises. Are you my son? Am I your mother? Who has told you so? What do such things mean—“son,” “mother”? Sophia Elizabeth Frick who died in 1892 regards Darian Licht born in 1900 with love, pity, recognition.

  It must have been, Darian thinks, that they’d disowned her. Their daughter. She’d eloped with Abraham Licht, she’d repudiated their world, they disowned and declared her dead.

  “My daughter.”

  So mesmerized is Darian by the portrait on the wall, by this woman who is his mother yet unknown to him, he hasn’t noticed Mrs. Frick beside him until the elderly woman speaks. “Isn’t she lovely? My daughter Sophie. Lost to me.” Mrs. Frick tells Darian that her daughter died of typhus traveling in the Greek Isles with her married sister and her family, what a tragedy! what waste!—“Sophie was an extraordinary girl, so sweet, warm, quick-witted, intelligent; a devout Christian; a lover of horses since girlhood; gifted at the piano—though nothing, of course, like you. She’d been courted by a dozen outstanding young men yet she was determined, she said, to remain independent. And then . . . ”

  Darian is expected to speak, he supposes; yet can’t speak.

  Darian hears the woman’s voice through a roaring in his ears.

  Darian is being led . . . to another portrait of Sophia Frick, a smaller, more intimate painting of a girl of perhaps sixteen in a blue velvet riding jacket, a plumed hat on her head, and a riding crop held in her gloved right hand. Darian. My love. If I’d but known you when I was thus, and you as you are. Darian tries to listen to his hostess’s voice but the roaring and rushing in his ears overwhelms him. His legs are weak, his senses go out like a candle flame, he falls heavily to the floor at the feet of the astonished Mrs. Frick, who stares down at him, the brilliant young pianist she’d been so eager to invite to her home, too shocked at first to cry for help.

  MUSIC IS SPEECH for those for whom speech is inadequate.

  The silence surrounding music is the secret soul of music.

  “THE LASS OF AVIEMORE”

  1.

  Lovely Millicent prepares for yet another dinner dance, beautiful Matilde fusses over her gleaming silk-blond bobbed hair, and there is Mina, cunning Mina, who adjusts the bodice (snug!) of the pretty flounced dress; and Marguerite (Mr. Anson’s beloved daughter, sweet, simpering, who nonetheless learned to smoke cigarettes on the sly) sees to the charming arch of the eyebrow and the near-imperceptible blush of the ceramic cheek; and Moira (born in New Orleans, honey-soft and feline but a shameless liar) . . . Moira sings “It Is Better to Be Laughing Than Crying” (as indeed it is) while regarding herself in profile in the mirror . . . in the mirrors reflecting mirrors . . . and declares the vision, or visions, complete.

  And God saw that it was good.

  And all these are the beginning of sorrows.

  2.

  “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” is being played in the glass-enclosed poinsettia-bedecked ballroom, Matilde St. Goar may be observed consenting to dance with a handsome young gentleman in white tie and tails, the graceful circling, the near-weightl
ess sweep, of a long flounced skirt, chiffon in filmy floating layers (white upon black upon white upon black), near-transparent sleeves falling loose to the elbow, the poreless doll’s face, the small measured flawless smile not quite covering the white, white teeth: just as Millicent, lazy sullen Millicent, stretches and yawns and rings for the maid to draw her bath (the purple bubble-soap this afternoon, smelling of plums, please), and lights up the first cigarette of the day, holding her sleep-stale breath for the pleasant little jolt, that agreeable sensual little zing, when the powerful smoke hits her pink-tender lungs. (Has Father breakfasted already?—but what time is it?—and has he, yes of course he has, the perfect brute, hidden away the newspapers?—so of course Millicent must send out for more on the sly, the New York City papers in particular, being greedy, quite shamelessly greedy—sweet Millie, yawning in the midst of a childish smile—greedy for news of history.)