The schumann proof, p.5
The Schumann Proof, page 5
“What did she want?”
“Bryce is still indisposed.”
“Did she say what’s the matter?”
“No. What she wanted was to know if—and I’m quoting— ‘that young man who played so well last night’ was still available.”
“Elly, you didn’t—”
“No, I merely told her you’d call.”
“Did she say when, or for how long?”
“No.”
“Does she have a lot of students?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You know how I hate sight-reading. I’d have to learn all that material.”
“You misunderstand. She already has an accompanist to cover her lessons. What she wants is someone to practise with. Alone. Just until Bryce is back.”
“I don’t know, Elly—”
“You can not-know as much as you like, but call her. This evening. She needs someone right away.”
“I’m working tonight.”
“Vikkan...”
“All right, all right.”
I glared at the phone after she hung up, wanting to take a hammer to it. I could understand why ancient Greeks used to kill the bearer of bad tidings.
Laura wasn’t due to arrive until seven, which gave me three hours to look over her music, the Schumann Liederkreis. Elly’s Schubert would need some work, too.
Pianists have different ways of settling in to practise. Some study their scores in silence from the comfort of an easy chair. Others sharpen pencils for marking fingerings and phrasing. Still others limber up, yoga-style. Not a few uncork a bottle of wine.
I went to the kitchen and got out a Gripstand bowl, two bread pans and a dough-cutter.
There isn’t much by way of counters in the little space under the loft, but as I jockeyed around bags of flour, oatmeal and flax, I heard a dry, familiar voice in the back of my head instructing, “Good cooks work wonders even in the smallest kitchens, provided they clean up as they go along.” Uncle Charles: Bertrand Russell professor emeritus at McMaster University, baker of his own bread (“instills patience and discipline”) and the closest thing I’d had to a parent after mine died on Highway 403 when I was six.
It took ten minutes to get everything ready—warming the Gripstand with hot water, ripping open bright red-and-yellow packages of yeast, sifting the dry ingredients, stirring in scalded milk. I tussled with the embryonic dough for another five minutes, beating it with a wooden spoon, then covered it with a damp dishtowel and moved on to a second pre-practice activity.
The roofer I’d spotted earlier had left a bruise on my memory, and I found myself thinking of Christian again, how he used to sit at our kitchen table, entranced, whenever I started in on rounds of baking, practising and whatever other project took my fancy at the time. “Discipline through avoidance,” I’d tell him. “If doing something makes me feel like I’m putting off doing something else, everything turns into a guilty pleasure.” His ghost didn’t understand any better than the living man.
Curtained off at the back of the carriage house, I’d set up a workspace—pressboard shelves, a lightbox, metal filing cabinet, a draughting table. I sat down on an office chair, rescued from the curb on Queen Street, and twisted around to the shelves, taking down a botany text, a copy of Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Culpeper’s Compleat Herbal, and a translation of the Greek physician, Galen. From the filing cabinet, I extracted a folder labelled Indian Pipe—Jack in the Pulpit, and, scooting over a couple of inches, laid the contents on the lightbox. Rows of photographic transparencies glowed to life like stained glass miniatures when I flipped a toggle switch on the side.
In the centre of the draughting table was a single, thick sheet of vellum paper, held in place by strips of acid-free tape. I pried the page free of its moorings and held it up for inspection. Herb Robert, uncials proclaimed at the top, Geranium Robertianum. Underneath, in cursive: Glanduliferous stem...pinnate or pinnatifid leaflets...styptic, exanthematous...against erysipelas. The arcana of plants—words to ensorcel leaves and roots, and turn age-old, homely physicks into esoteric science.
As a child, I loved to know what plants were called. For reasons I still don’t understand, I wanted to be able to greet them correctly, by name. Uncle Charles had helped. With the books he bought, Devil’s Paintbrush became Orange Hawkweed, and later, Hieracium aurantiacum. The interest had faded when I entered my teens—there’d been very little time for anything but music—but up in Caledon, it had resurfaced, in force.
After Christian’s death, I couldn’t face the project I was now working on. But like a blade of grass that pushes up through concrete to reach the light, it had poked its head through layers of grief and was once again a flourishing source of fascination and distraction.
I filed the Herb Robert page between onion skins in a shallow wooden box and set out nibs and a small jar of ink. Preparing another sheet of vellum and dog-earing entries in the reference books occupied just enough time for my dough to have finished resting and be ready for kneading.
“Six hundred strokes,” a spectral Uncle Charles lectured. “Bread becomes jaded if you lavish too much attention on it.” I sprinkled water on the counter and sank my hands into the sticky mass. At first, it clung with every stroke, but after ten minutes, it was stretching and shrinking smoothly under the heels of my hands. I stopped, sweating, and unbuttoned my shirt. Another ten minutes, and Uncle Charles’ requirements had been satisfied. I tucked the flesh-warm dough back into its bowl and set it in the oven to rise in its own heat.
Fingers and arms limbered, thoughts neatly ranged like paper, pen and ink, I got a beer from the fridge and went to the piano. The gleaming August-Förster had been a gift from Uncle Charles, bought with money from my parents’ estate. It fills most of the front room. The only other piece of furniture is a throw-covered Sally-Ann couch that sulks beneath the window like a disenfranchised relation.
I spread photocopies out across the music rack—down flat, a habit I’d picked up playing at Evelyn—and started in on Elly’s Schubert. She’d selected “teaching” repertoire: “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, “An die Musik”, “Du bist die Ruh’ ”. Gretchen’s spinning wheel sounded a bit creaky when I set it into motion. The hypnotic up-and-down rotation of sixteenth notes lurched instead of whirling smoothly. I dislodged dust and cobwebs from the mechanism by banging out the whole song fortissimo prestissimo, then tried again. This time, the sound came out just right, spindly and mesmerizing, a perfect accompaniment to Gretchen’s anxious reveries. “An die Musik” got only a cursory run-through; the simple repeated chords offer no special challenge. I spent longer on “Du bist die Ruh’ ”, sending shivers up my spine with Schubert’s aching harmonic suspensions.
An hour and a half, a bottle of beer, and four cigarettes later, I broke off and checked my dough, punching it down and returning it to the oven. In the back room, I picked up a loupe and inspected my transparencies. Eleven close-ups of Indian Pipe came into focus as I moved the lens across the celluloid. The photos came from Léo St-Onge’s Caledon estate. My folio, consisting of the pictures and hand-lettered pages, would be a gift to his wife if ever I got it finished.
I spent fifteen minutes choosing which shot of Indian Pipe to use. The ghostly white plant had been difficult to capture. A little overexposure yielded just the right shade of pearly luminosity, but bleached definition from the scaly stems. Underexposure turned the waxy blossoms an unpleasant shade of pewter. Of the three where colour and definition were perfect, I selected one where two plants nodded up against each other, looking intimate and dejected at the same time.
My afternoon alone was having what the old herbals call “a soverein effect”. An effortless flow of notes whispered out of the piano when I started in on “In der Fremde”, the first of Laura’s Schumann. The voice that sings in my head when I practise accompaniments floated plaintively overtop:
Aus der Heimat hinter den Blitzen rot
Da kommen die Wolken her...
“From my homeland, red lightening stains the sky / And clouds loom not far behind.” An equivocal image, blurred by Schumann’s veiled, minor mode setting. War, or hallucination? Recollection, or oneiric landscape?
The simple melody came around again:
Aber Vater und Mutter sind lange tot
Es kennt mich dort keiner mehr.
Straightforward statements replaced the vague imagery, but ambiguous harmonies underneath robbed them of clear meaning. “But father and mother in graves do lie / Unknown there, no kin shall I find.”
Suddenly, the music switched to an ardent, major tonality. Soaring vocal leaps replaced the guarded intervals of the song’s first two phrases.
Wie bald, ach wie bald kommt die stille Zeit
Da ruhe ich auch, da ruhe ich auch...
“How soon, oh, how soon comes that silent time / when I too, shall rest...”
When I, too, shall rest. Unanticipated, the voice of remembrance began a duet with the one already in my head. My playing faltered. A single word in the next phrase caught my eye. Waldeinsamkeit. Fervidly drawn out, its four syllables revealed the object of the song’s cryptic longing—forest solitude, sylvan isolation. A serene, indifferent place, secluded from the world, sheltered by overhanging trees. Christian—remote, solitary Christian—had tried to share a place like that with me in life. I’d never have it back. I swallowed hard against a tightness in my throat and turned to another song.
Laura arrived at a quarter after seven. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, shrugging out of a windbreaker. “I got confused between Indian Grove and Indian Road.” She laid her jacket on the couch. “This is terrific. Nice piano.”
It was the first time she’d been to my place. Up until then, we’d always practised at her apartment over by the Don Valley. The August-Förster would make a nice change from her old Mason & Risch.
She insisted on looking around, climbing up to the loft (“...like a tree fort up here...”), checking out the bathroom (“A sink in the shower? That’s clever...”), inspecting the kitchen (“Roll top counters?” “So I don’t have to look at dirty dishes.”). It felt strange having someone exclaim over the renovations. I really hadn’t planned on the results appealing to anyone but me.
“And you bake?” She peered at the loaves arching over their pans in the oven. “Every woman’s dream.”
We rehearsed for an hour and a half. If my playing seemed mechanical, distracted even, she chose to ignore it. When we finished, I offered her a ride home. She declined, which left me an hour to clean up the kitchen, shower, bully my hair into submission, and put on a tux. I have two; the other one’s at work, in case some days I don’t make it home to change.
I left the apartment at nine-thirty and by ten o’clock was sitting at an overlarge Yamaha, adorning the opulent dimness of Evelyn with strains of “Moonlight In Vermont”.
Three
Alte Wunder wieder scheinen.
(“Wond’rous things of old appearing”)
—Liederkreis, Opus 39, XII
I’d been hoping to see Léo at Evelyn Tuesday night, but he hadn’t come in. “At a wine and food show,” Toby Ryan, the weeknight bartender, told me. “Porking out with the rich and shameless.”
“I need to remind him that I might be starting late tomorrow.”
“You want me to leave a note?”
“Will he be in in the morning?”
“Around eleven.”
“Just say I’ll drop by then.”
Playing at the lounge keeps me busy four nights a week: Sunday, then Tuesday through Thursday. Mondays, it’s closed. Fridays and Saturdays, a trio dispenses cool jazz to quench the patrons’ musical thirst. I try to restrict extracurricular engagements to my nights off, but every once in a while, conflicts do arise. Léo never objects, although more than once I’ve used him as an excuse to get out of doing things for Elly.
I drove back Wednesday morning and spent fifteen minutes looking for parking. A space finally showed up five blocks north of Evelyn, on Bedford Road. Clear skies and a summer-warm breeze mitigated the annoyance of walking back to Prince Arthur. I wondered how long the weather would hold. A suggestion of haze high up in the atmosphere hinted at change.
Léo St-Onge’s contribution to the good life in Toronto sits on a gracious lot at an exemplary address in an exorbitantly pricey part of town. Architects’ studios, lawyers’ offices and tasteful little art galleries rub shoulders with the refurbished former manse. Léo had assessed the lie of the land unerringly. A scion of old Montreal money, now in his sixties, he’d wanted an establishment that captured something of his home city’s savoir-faire, the sort of place where the oil-and-water of lucre and learning could commingle. He’d succeeded. Evelyn’s gleaming rosewood dining room and baize-coddled, second-floor lounge stood at a nexus of affluence and erudition. The former streamed down from residential streets north of Prince Arthur; the latter came up from the university. The two met and regularly flowed in and out of Evelyn’s gleaming doors, leaving behind a rich silt of profit and prestige.
Rosemary Dickens, Léo’s restaurant manager, greeted me at the service entrance and offered her cheek for a kiss. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said.
“Is Léo in?”
“He’s down at Queen’s Quay getting a wine shipment.”
“How long will he be?”
“An hour, maybe, depending on traffic. Come in and have a coffee.”
She led me through the kitchen, past rows of stainless steel shelves and dangling copper pots. Her patent-leather pumps clicked smartly on the tile floor. Many clients imagine that Rosemary is Evelyn’s eponym. A slender woman with large brown eyes and russet hair, her make-up is flawless, her clothes expensive and her shoes always tastefully seductive. Léo couldn’t have found a better incarnation of urbane sophistication.
“Do you mind waiting here?” she asked when we reached her office, a tiny room off the passage between the kitchen and the dining room. “They’re setting up for lunch.” Behind her, busboys were spreading linen and polishing glasses.
“This is fine.”
While she went in search of coffee, I made myself comfortable on a love seat pushed against one wall of her office. Léo had repeatedly offered her a larger space, but she always turned him down. “I can see everything from here,” she said. “Keeps the staff on their toes.”
When she came back, steaming cappuccino in hand, I asked to use the phone. I’d forgotten to call das Vöglein the night before; Elly was going to kill me.
An answering machine kicked in after three rings. I left the number at Evelyn, hoping Ulrike was with a student and would call back shortly.
“Who was that?” Rosemary asked, never shy with questions.
“Someone I’ll be turning down.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“A teacher who wants me to do some work. Accompanying.”
“Teacher?”
“Voice. At the Conservatory.”
“The Conservatory? I didn’t know you played classical music.”
“Léo never told you?”
“No. Is there anything else about you he neglected to mention?”
The phone rang before I could think up a smart reply. Rosemary answered and handed me the receiver, her head tilted quizzically. Maybe it was the Marlene Dietrich accent on the other end.
Ulrike went straight to the point. “I have spoken with Eleanor Gardiner,” she said. “She has explained to you that I need someone?”
“Yes.”
“So you are available? This afternoon?”
Her abruptness caught me off guard. I’d been planning to turn her down, but suddenly, I couldn’t muster a single excuse.
“What time?” I asked, feeling like I do when Elly calls first thing in the morning.
“Two-thirty. Herr Professor Dieter Mann will be here. You are aware that he is in town?”
“Ja, gewiß,” I answered, slipping into German so I wouldn’t get annoyed with her Teutonic habit of making questions sound like accusations. “Of course. Ich habe ihn gestern am Flughafen mitgenommen. Wird dies dann eine Unterrichtsstunde sein?” I asked, curious why Mann would be present.
“No,” she said, sounding faintly amused. “It will not be a lesson.” Perhaps she found the idea of needing instruction impertinent.
I still had time to offer excuses: short notice, I didn’t know what she was singing, I’d have to sight read—the whole litany. It never worked with Elly, but I was ready to give it a shot when Ulrike announced: “Herr Professor will be bringing the music. I would have preferred my own accompanist, of course, since he already knows the work, but Fräulein Gardiner assures me you are competent.”
I bit back the urge to ask why she herself hadn’t noticed. “Your accompanist,” I temporized, still hoping an excuse would spring to mind, “that would be David Bryce?”
“That is correct.”
“What will you be singing?”
“It is difficult to explain. Please just come by at two-thirty.”
It looked as if I’d be taking the job whether I wanted it or not. She gave me directions to her home—not on Castle Frank as I’d heard, but north of the subway station with the same name—and finished off with a curt “Bis später.” Till later.
I’d scarcely put the phone down when it rang again. Rosemary picked it up and spoke briefly, glancing at me. “Léo,” she said, hanging up. “He’s been delayed. He won’t be here till one.”
“I’ll come back.”
“Stay and finish your coffee. I have to go check tables.”
I could have left a message with her, but I wanted to see Léo in person. He’d been in Montreal the previous week, taking care of the family fortune, and I needed to ask a favour, in addition to reminding him that I might be late coming in that evening. I knew he’d agree; asking was a matter of form, to remind us both that he was now my employer, as well as a friend.
