Body & Soul (11 page)

"Relative minor of G?"

"E."

"Relative minor of E?"

"C-sharp."

"Relative major of C?"

"E-flat." Claude smiled when he knew Weisfeld was being easy.

"Subdominant of D?"

"G."

"Dominant of A?"

"E."

"Of A major or A minor?"

"Both."

"Four flats is...?"

"A-flat major or F minor."

"Five sharps is...?"

"B major or G-sharp minor."

"Good," said Weisfeld, his arm appearing over Claude's shoulder, his finger tapping the page. "Play this again for me please, and watch the fingering in the fifth bar."

"Was it wrong?"

"Indeed it was. Like everybody else, you want to avoid your fourth finger."

"I hate that finger. It feels like a hot dog."

Weisfeld laughed. "That's good! Splendid. You know, Schumann built this cockamamie machine with strings and pulleys to strengthen
his fourth finger. He'd play like that, his finger pulling the weight, making it harder to hit the notes. Poor soul."

"What happened?"

"He wound up worse than when he started. He wound up with a hot dog bun. Well, there are no shortcuts, my friend." Weisfeld got up and put a pile of manuscripts on the piano. Claude took the first one, opened it, and set it on the stand, quickly checking the key signature, the time signature, flipping the pages looking for any changes, clef displacements, or special kinds of notation. Only then would he go back to the beginning and start to play.

Unbeknownst to Claude, Weisfeld put a good deal of thought into the music he selected for this part of the lesson. He considered degrees of difficulty of execution, varieties of style, mood, and period. He drew from the sixteenth century to Tin Pan Alley and jazz. He included, but rarely, atonal music (of which Claude was not fond), in order to train the boy to sight-read music that was idiomatically unfamiliar to him and to develop his ability to hear the music written on the page. He wrote out little pieces of his own containing jokes, musical barbarisms, satires of famous composers, and takeoffs of popular music, and was inevitably delighted at Claude's relish in playing these. The boy was spookily sophisticated in this regard and would sometimes laugh so hard, so explosively, he would have to stop playing. He begged Weisfeld for more of these, and copied them out in his laborious child's hand to take home. (It was a quiet, slightly guilty pleasure for Weisfeld to see the boy's notation evolve away from the attempt to imitate printed music toward an echo of Weisfeld's own handwriting.)

As Claude struggled through a not particularly difficult piece of Beethoven, Weisfeld pondered once again the surprising fact that sight-reading was hard for the boy, and progress slower than average. His own dead daughter had moved twice as fast at a younger age. It was puzzling.

"That's a dotted half note," he broke in. "Why are you holding it so long?"

"I'm sorry."

"You do that a lot, you know. Hold on, or interrupt the flow."

The boy looked down at his lap.

"Are you aware of it?"

"I guess so." He paused. "But usually it's after. I mean it's after, so it's too late."

Weisfeld stroked his mustache. "After what?"

"After..." He stared out over the piano. "After I hear the sound."

Weisfeld nodded and remained silent.

"I can't hear the chords that fast," Claude said. "If it's just notes one after another like the melody or something it's okay, but the chords, they're all so different, they sound so different it's like, it's like..."

Again Weisfeld nodded. "Interesting. Go on, please. Try to tell me." He felt the boy's anxiety clearly, like a scent in the air, but something told him to press a bit. Weisfeld had no illusions about what he considered to be his limits as a teacher. He was simply prepping the child, getting him ready for others who would deal with higher matters—interpretation, technique, inner voices, dynamics, and all the rest—and sight-reading was a major part of that prepping. The important teachers would never take him on without it. As well, Weisfeld was truly curious.

The boy puffed his cheeks, blew out the air, and suddenly struck a chord from the Beethoven. He let it ring for a second and then talked over it.

"See? It's moving." His hands immobile on the keys, he twisted to look at Weisfeld. "Hear it moving?"

"Yes."

Claude played another, more complicated chord. "And this one." He let it ring. "It moves more. It's moving a lot. You know what I mean? Inside and outside all moving around."

"I understand."

"So I guess I want to hear that before I let it go."

"This is a great help," Weisfeld said. "There are ways we can approach this."

"What is that?" the boy asked. "Why does it do that?"

Weisfeld got off the stool and began to pace back and forth. He looked around the crowded basement. "Well, we'll have to get a blackboard down here." He moved to the piano, cleared off the sheet music, and raised the lid. As he fixed the wooden rod to hold it up he asked, "How are you with numbers? Have you done much arithmetic at school?"

"Sure," Claude said quickly, eager to return to the question of the chords. "I hear the sound, and then I hear stuff inside, like different notes coming and going."

"Come over here and stand by the strings."

The boy obeyed and Weisfeld went to the keyboard.

"I'm going to play a chord," he said. "Stick your head in there and listen."

The chord was played. Weisfeld kept the sustain pedal depressed. As the sound echoed Weisfeld said, "Now the soft sounds you hear, is this one of them?" Very gently he pressed a note higher on the keyboard.

"Yes, yes!"

"Now come over here." When the boy could see the keyboard Weisfeld replayed the chord, and then the high note.

"It isn't in the chord," the boy said with wonder. "The high note isn't in the chord."

"Exactly."

"So what do I, how come it, what is it—"

"Harmonics," Weisfeld said. "Overtones. It's quite logical, nothing weird. But we have a great deal of work to do for you to understand how it works. It may take some time."

"You can't tell me now?" Claude played the magic high note several times, as if the tip of his finger could somehow give him the information.

"We have to start from the ground up. You must be patient," Weisfeld said.

She was sitting in the chair staring up at the fan-shaped window when he came home from shining shoes and eating corned beef hash at the cafeteria. The faucet in the kitchenette dripped at long, regular intervals.

"They're taking me to Washington," she said in a flat voice.

"Why?"

"I'm not sure. I'm not supposed to worry. I'll be in a nice hotel. They'll give me twenty dollars a day."

"That's good."

She sighed and shifted her weight. "Some meetings or hearings or something. They don't tell me much. They say all I have to do is watch."

"Watch what?"

"I don't know. They're probably lying."

Claude didn't know what to make of this remark. In the movies—and he went now whenever he could—the G-men were clearly good and never lied. The authorities were a benevolent force. Maybe she
was drinking again, but he couldn't smell it and there weren't any bottles. He had seen Agent Burdick now several times, and he didn't think the man was a liar. He liked Burdick.

"I'll be gone a few days," she said.

"Okay." He went to his room.

He lay down on the cot and stared at the ceiling. She was in some kind of trouble. For the first time he began to put things together in a vague sort of way. The newspapers talked about Communism, the Red Menace, Russia, Stalin, spies, and something called "fellow travelers" (the precise meaning of which was unknown to him, but he knew it wasn't good). There was a whole lexicon—dupes, pinkos, radicals, agitators, intellectuals, subversives, cell members, bolsheviks, and so on—used in what he understood to be a description of a great contest going on between the forces of good and the forces of evil. (He had first learned to scan for some of these words when he'd read about Eisler.) But it was the very enormity and grandeur of this struggle, like battles in some mythical context, that kept him from ever connecting it with his mother. The idea seemed ludicrous on its face. Nevertheless, he began to entertain the notion that somehow a mistake had been made. He sat up and was about to go in and talk to her, but he stopped himself, realizing that he didn't really know what to ask or how to begin. Knowing, as well, she would volunteer nothing.

Some instinct kept him from saying anything to Mr. Weisfeld. It was the same impulse he'd felt when Weisfeld had shown up at the door—not to let him in, not to let him see—although on that occasion things had turned out well.

She was away for a week, longer than expected, but Claude barely noticed. He could almost believe he had forgotten about her as he kept to his routines. At night he contemplated the implications of harmonics at the kitchenette counter, making diagrams and fiddling with numbers.

It had been, at first, a distinct shock to learn that the beautiful and reassuring orderliness of the keyboard and of the harmony he had thus far learned was impure, a compromise with nature. Tempering seemed like tampering. If A was 440 vibrations per second, and an octave above was 880, wasn't that a clear sign? Weisfeld had gone to the blackboard to explicate, checking back to see if Claude had understood each model before he erased it and went on to draw another.
Over a number of sessions Claude paid full but edgy attention, unconsciously resisting the whole idea.

"So you mean even though a half tone is called a half tone, it isn't necessarily half of the whole tone?"

"Exactly," Weisfeld said. "Not in natural tuning. The whole tones can be different too, compared to tempered."

"So instead of letting the mistake happen all at once, you sort of spread it out over everything?" Slightly grudging acceptance.

"Yes. That's a good way to put it." He stroked his mustache, getting chalk on it. "I don't know if I'd use the word 'mistake,' but I know what you mean."

But then one afternoon it all came together. Weisfeld had drawn two diagrams, a circle and a spiral, corresponding to tempered and natural tuning. He filled in the sharps and flats, double sharps and double flats, checked the letters, and stepped back. For several moments there was silence as they stared at the board.

"You see?" Weisfeld indicated the circle. "This really does make it a circle. Everything comes back. Go up the sharps in the cycle of fifths and you get back. Go the other way with the flats in the cycle of fourths and you get back. You can go around and around."

"That's wonderful," Claude said, relishing the neat, closed beauty of it. "I get it. They
had
to do it."

"Hmmm." Weisfeld was absorbed in the board. After a moment he tapped the spiral. "And this is worth thinking about, worth remembering. As you go around the sharps, the note is sharper than the starting point. Or go twelve times with the flats, and the note would sound too low to us. So in a sense the actual nature of the scales changes as you move." He stepped back from the board. "Worth remembering, philosophically speaking." He spread his arms. "An infinite number of scales in nature." He brought his hands in, palms facing each other as if he were holding an invisible loaf of bread. "And we work in this little area. This part of the spectrum."

When she came home she started drinking again, flushed and angry in her chair, rambling on until all hours. She was incapable of staying on a single subject for more than a few minutes, veering off into the past or into a discourse on some public figure, or on the working class, but eventually he put together what had happened in Washington, D.C.

At first they had put her in the waiting room of a small office. She
had only to sit on the couch and read magazines. Day after day, people were brought through the door, past the couch, and into the interior office. She could hear voices droning. Some of the people looked at her when they emerged. She recognized only a few, but gave no sign to them or anyone else.

Then she was moved to a large public room where hearings were going on. Microphones, photographers, spectators, seated and lining the walls. She was placed in the front row of a special side section in such a way as to be visible to anyone at the witness table. Once again, all she was asked to do was to sit and remain silent. Then one night she'd had a few beers, and without telling anyone, went to the station and caught the train to New York.

"They can all go fuck themselves," she said from the chair, raising bourbon in an ironic toast. "The feds, the finks, and the noble assholes with their precious honor—they can all go fuck themselves."

The next day she received a letter by certified mail telling her that her hack license had been suspended for sixty days, effective immediately. She made Claude come with her to the Hack Bureau. They took the subway downtown, rocking on the straw seats in the silent roar. Claude watched the strap loops swinging back and forth and counted the stations flashing by.

The Hack Bureau was set in the corner of a huge municipal building. Under tall, narrow, grimy windows, people moved along the perimeter, stopping or lining up at grilled windows and doors leading to the interior and a maze of offices and cubicles. The high, angling light in the smoky air created a sepulchral mood. Claude's mother approached the appropriate grill and handed over the certified letter.

"Who do I see about this?"

The clerk, an elderly bird-like woman with pronounced wattles and thick glasses, examined the paper.

"It's a suspension." She looked up. "This is you? You're a driver?"

"Yes, it's me. Now who do I see?"

"Goodness." She looked at Claude and then back at Emma. "Well, you better wait. Over there." She turned and summoned another clerk, handed her the paper, and muttered something.

Claude and his mother found places on a long wooden bench. A constant flow of people moving in both directions passed before them, many of them clutching papers or forms of one kind or another. Some stopped to read with puzzled faces before they turned around to retrace their steps. Every now and then a cop would go by. Two old
women sat beside them on the bench. After an hour Emma went up to the window again, and then returned. One of the old women ate an apple. Claude was both fascinated and repulsed by the stray white hairs on her chin.