Meg Wolitzer (34:22)
A Wagner Matinee I received one morning a letter written in pale ink on glassy blue lined notepaper and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village. Village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard. It informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it had become necessary for her to come to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and render her whatever services might prove necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I found it no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether. The name of my aunt Georgiana, called up not alone, her own figure at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of recollection so wide and deep that as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my existence. Holy, ill at ease and out of place amid the surroundings of my study, I became, in short, the gangling farmer boy my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and raw from the corn husking, I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organization, thumbing the scales with my stiff red hands, while she, beside me, made canvas mittens for the huskers. The next morning I set out for the station. When the train arrived, I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and when I got her into the carriage she looked not unlike one of those charred smoke bodies that firemen lift from the debris of a burned building. She had come all the way in a day coach. Her linen duster had become black with soot and her black bonnet gray with dust. During the journey. When we arrived at my boarding house, the landlady put her to bed at once, and I did not see her again until the next morning. Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's misshapen figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have Left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land or their health. Somewhere along, along the upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory. Somewhere back in the latter 60s. One summer, which she had spent in the little village in the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those absurd and extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of 21 sometimes inspires in a plain, angular, spectacled woman of 30. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who of course had no money, took a homestead in red Willow County, 50 miles from the railroad. There they measured off their 80 acres by driving across the prairie in a wagon to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to the conditions of primitive savagery. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank. For 30 years, my aunt had not been farther than 50 miles from the homestead. But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of this and must have been considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the soiled linen duster, which, on her arrival was the most conspicuous feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress whose ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor aunt's figure, however, would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker. Originally stooped, her shoulders were now almost bent together over her sunken chest. She wore ill fitting false teeth, and her skin was yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to pitiless wind and to the alkaline water which transforms the most transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather. The most striking thing about her physiognomy, however, was the incessant twitching of the mouth and eyebrows, a form of nervous disorder resulting from isolation and monotony and from frequent physical suffering. In my boyhood, this affliction had possessed a sort of horrible fascination for me of which I was secretly very much ashamed, for in those days I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way and had a reverential affection for her during the three winters when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking three meals for half a dozen farmhands and putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing board, hearing me at the kitchen table beside her recite Latin Declensions and conjugations and gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or mending that I read my first Shakespeare, and her old textbook of mythology was the first that ever came into my hands. She taught me my scales and exercises too, on the little parlor organ which her husband had bought her after 15 years during which she had not so much as seen any instrument except an accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farm hands. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting, while I struggled with the harmonious blacksmith. But she seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman and she had the consolation of religion, and to her at least her martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once, when I had been doggedly beating out some easy passages from an old score of Euryanthe that I had found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulders shoulder, saying tremulously, don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice be, it is not that. When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival, she was still in a semi somnambulent state. She seemed not to realize that she was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for hungrily for half a lifetime. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk together in the straw thatched cowshed. And she, because I was more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to me, would tell me of the splendid performance of Meyerbeer's Huguenots she had seen in Paris in her youth. At 2 o' clock the Boston Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I intended to take my aunt, though as I conversed with her I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the long struggle mercifully ended at last. She questioned me absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half skimmed milk to a weakling calf, and had neglected to tell her daughter about the freshly opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, that it would spoil if it were not used directly. I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their respective situations and had once possessed the piano score of the Flying Dutchman. I began to think it would have been best to get her back to Red Willow county without waking her, and regretted having suggested the concert. From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle less passive and inert and seemed to begin to perceive her surroundings. I had felt some trepidation, lest she might become aware of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into a world to which she had been dead for a quarter of a century. But again I found how superficially I had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal, separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have seen the same aloofness in old miners who drift into the brown hotel at Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard faces unshorn, as though they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon or in the yellow blaze of the Arizona desert. The audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was only the color contrast of bodices past counting the shimmer and shading of fabric, soft and firm, silky and sheer, resisting and yielding, all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead black shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of tube paint on a palette. When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir of anticipation and looked with quickening interest down over the rail at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine. When I came, fresh from plowing forever and ever between green aisles of corn, I reminded myself of the impression made on me by the clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats the beloved shapes of the instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green shaded stand lamps on the smooth varnished bellies of the cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the restless wind tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows. I recalled how in the first orchestra I had ever heard, those long boasting strokes seemed to draw the soul out of me as a conjurer's stick reels out paper ribbon from a hat. The first number was the Tannhauser Overture. When the violins drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's Chorus, my Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve. Then it was that I first realized that for her this singing of basses and stinging frenzy of lighter strings broke a silence of 30 years. The inconceivable silence of the plains with the battle between the two motifs, with the bitter frenzy of the Venusburg theme and its ripping of strings, came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and where we are still so powerless to combat. I saw again the tall naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress, the black pond where I had learned to swim. The world there is the flat world of the ancients. To the east a cornfield that stretched daybreak, to the west a corral that stretched to sunset between the sordid conquests of peace more merciless than those of war. The overture closed. My aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of 30 years, through the films made little by little by each of the 365 days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and her musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and Meyerbeers, and I could remember hearing her sing years ago certain melodies of verdes. When I had fallen ill with a fever, she used to sit by my cot in the evening and sing Home to our Mountains, oh, let us return in a way fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness. Already I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Iseult, trying vainly to conjecture what that warfare of motifs, that seething turmoil of strings and winds, might mean to her. Had this music any message for her? Wagner had been a sealed book to Americans before the 60s. Had she anything left with which to comprehend this glory that had flashed around the world since she had gone from it? I was in a fever of curiosity. But Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility through the numbers from the Flying Dutchman, though her fingers worked mechanically upon her black dress as though of themselves they were recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands. They were stretched and pulled and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead with the palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and knotted on one of them a thin worn band that once had been a wedding ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, I remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days. Soon after the tenor began the Prize song, I heard a quick drawn breath and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her cheeks, and I think in a moment more they were in my eyes as well. It never really dies, then, the soul, it withers to the outward eye only like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again. My aunt wept gently throughout the development and elaboration of the melody. During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I questioned my aunt and found that the prize song was not new to her. Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp cow puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Bayreuth, where he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls of a Sunday morning. He used to sit on his gingham sheeted bed in the hand's bedroom which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle and singing the Prize song. While my aunt went about her work in the kitchen, she had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon him to join the country church, though his soul fit for this step, so far as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody. Shortly afterward he had gone to town on the 4th of July, been drunk for several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collarbone. Well, we have come to better things than the old trovatore, at any rate, Aunt Georgie? I queried with well meant jocularity. Her lip quivered and she hastily put a handkerchief up to her mouth. From behind it she murmured, and you have been hearing this ever since you left me, Clark? Her question was the gentlest and saddest of reproaches. The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the ring. This was followed by the forest music from Siegfried, and the program closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly but almost continuously. I was perplexed as to what measure of musical comprehension was left to her. To her, who had heard nothing but the singing of gospel hymns in Methodist services at the square frame schoolhouse on section 13. I was unable to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds or worked into bread or milked into the bottom of a pail. The deluge of sound poured on and on. I never knew what she found in the shining current of it. I never knew how far it bore her, or past what happy islands, or under what skies. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that the Siegfried march at least carried her out where the myriad graves are, out into the gray burying grounds of the sea, or into some world of death vaster yet, where from the beginning of the world hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream and renouncing slept. The concert was over. The people filed out of the hall, chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again. But my kinswoman made no effort to rise. I spoke gently to her. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. I don't want to go, Clark. I don't want to go, I understood for her. Just outside the door of the concert hall lay the black pond with the cattle tracked bluffs, the tall unpainted house naked as a tower with weather curled boards, the cork backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry, the gaunt molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.
