Body & Soul (25 page)

When Claude had gone to his school mailbox for the harmony exam, he'd been surprised to see it unmarked, with only one notation at the bottom of the last page:
accepted for composition,
in Satterthwaite's severely slanted hand. Nor had any mention of it been made since. All the more remarkable, Claude thought, because there were only two students, himself and a moody, self-absorbed math whiz named Platt. Twice a week they sat, one seat away from each other, in the front row of the music room, watching Satterthwaite drift back and forth in front of the blackboard, lecturing with his slight lisp, filling the air with chalk motes in rapid spasms of erasure.

Then one day—the big day, Claude was later to think of it—the startling news was revealed. Satterthwaite wrote
I x V I
on the board.

"This," he said, tapping the board with the chalk, "represents the music of the classical period and almost all of the romantic period. I, establish the tonic;
x,
develop harmonies as long as you like; leading to V, the dominant; and returning to
I,
the tonic and closure. Tonal music. It has prevailed for more than three hundred years. This is what you've been doing in your little exercises up to now." He went to his desk and sat on the corner. "But as you have no doubt noticed from my daily analyses of the romantics on the board, there is a progressively more impatient pressing against the bounds of tonality rising through the latter part of the nineteenth century. More and more work at the edges of the system. Do you see that?"

"Yes," said Platt. "Definitely."

Claude nodded.

"So things were building up, and then, all at once, about fifty years ago, everything changed." He snapped his fingers, exactly as Ivan had done. "Like that!" The smile on his tight face was almost eerie. "Schönberg!"

Silence. Satterthwaite raised his hands in the air, folded them as if in prayer, touched the end of his nose, and said again, more softly this time, "Schönberg"

And so, in the next few classes the story was told. Schönberg's early traditional work. His brave leap to atonality and the long period of grappling with its theoretical implications, culminating, finally, in the twelve-tone system of composition. The greatest and most exciting advance in the history of music, according to Satterthwaite.

"You must understand that tonality is nothing more than the way we have been trained to hear. Assonance, dissonance, these are matters, in a certain sense, of fashion. Nothing more. We have been trained into tonality, and the new music can train us out of it. Someday, when the larger and purer music has opened our ears, we will hear everything differently. You understand what I'm saying? We will hear differently. And that, gentlemen, is what this class is all about. I will lead you out of your tonal prejudices into an entirely new world. The world of the future."

Both boys were mesmerized by the change in their teacher, from a distant, sarcastic figure to a man seized by a vision. They glimpsed a kind of messianic prophet breaking through the cool facade, and for a moment it scared them, it was so abrupt and powerful. But, almost as if by an effort of will, the fire in his eyes was suddenly extinguished and he was back to his old self, moving to the board.

"So, let us begin. We start to use a new vocabulary. The tone row, for instance."

It was raining outside, so they lounged in the common room, on opposite couches, their feet up on the low table in between.

"Say that again, please," Ivan requested, pulling at his right eyebrow, trying to see the hairs, his eyes crossed.

"What are you doing?" Exasperated, Claude made a clucking sound.

"I'm listening, I'm listening. Say again."

"Well," Claude said, "you write what he calls a set. You use all
twelve tones in any order you want, but no tone can appear more than once in the set."

"Why not?"

"If you use a note more than once, it might suggest a tonality. Like, that's the tonic. The point is to avoid
anything
that suggests tonality."

"Aha. I understand, vaguely."

"And then, get this. As you go along you can use the set the way you wrote it. You can use it upside down, backwards, or backwards upside down."

"Sounds like Bach, a bit."

"But only those ways," Claude said. "And anyway, the whole point of Bach's system was to reconcile chromaticism and tonality. There was a reason for his so-called rules."

"Why do you say 'so-called'?"

"Because he broke them all the time. Whenever he wanted. These rules are strict."

"At least they're simple."

"Not that simple," said Claude. "Once you've made a set, you're allowed to state it beginning on any one of the twelve tones."

"Hmm."

"You can state vertically, in chords, or horizontally, like some weird melody. It gets complicated. But the thing is, I don't see what the big deal is. I don't understand where the rules have any reason behind them, except to avoid tonality."

"A negative
raison d'être.
"

"What does that, I hate it when you speak French, what does..."

"Sorry, sorry. A negative reason for being. Avoid tonality and be forced into the new way of hearing you were talking about. Maybe it
is
a big deal. Maybe they think some new kind of hyper-harmony will emerge? Sounds very idealistic. Like Marx saying the State will wither away."

"It just feels wrong somehow," Claude said. "The whole thing."

Claude's daily routine during this time was highly structured, having come about quite naturally. It gave him a sense of security. Interruptions, unexpected events, or unforeseen demands on his time could make him irritable. He woke in his cot at five-thirty every morning—to the sound of the Big Ben alarm clock he'd gotten from Weisfeld to
catch the train to Frank's Landing in the old days—ate cereal in the dark and silent kitchenette, went up Third Avenue to the music store, entered with his own key, and went down to the basement for two hours of practice on the Bechstein. Scales. Exercises to warm up, to get the fingers supple, the arms and shoulders moving smoothly. ("Not just a digital exercise," Fredericks had said. "They are beautiful. They can be played beautifully." Claude had discovered the truth of those words.) And then an hour or so of sight-reading. To the right of the Bechstein's music stand was a large and ever-changing pile of music— where both Claude and Weisfeld tossed manuscripts of all kinds—from which Claude would blindly pull something, play it, and then move it over to the pile on the left of the music stand. Then forty-five minutes to an hour of concentrated effort on whatever special piece he was working on at the time At eighty-thirty Weisfeld would open the door at the top of the stairs and cry, "Good morning good morning!" Claude would then finish ud and ascend for the coffee Weisfeld brought down from his quarters in large mugs. They usually sat on stools by the cash register, or sometimes up front looking out at the street. By nine o'clock Claude would be at school. Except for the time he spent with Ivan, he used every available minute—free periods, lunch, part of gym, assembly—to read, prepare for his classes, or do homework. The other boys, most of them relaxed, good-natured, given to larking about at every opportunity, seemed nevertheless to respect his privacy and did not tease him. Indeed, sometimes when they passed him as he worked in some corner, or sitting on the stairs, they would lower their voices, nodding as they passed. He knew a few of them by name, but most only by their last names, as they were addressed in class: Baldridge, Keller, Wilson, Abernathy, Cooper, Garcez, Peabody.

At four he was back in the store, waiting on customers, arranging the stock, sweeping the floor or doing whatever else was needed. Occasionally Weisfeld would go out for short periods, coming back with a book or some groceries. Now and then he would unlock the door to the second floor and go upstairs for a nap. Claude could hear the creaking of the floorboards as he moved around up there.

He usually ate supper at Wright's, the Automat, or one of the cafeterias on Eighty-sixth Street. He had a favorite meal at each establishment. Then he would return to the store—Weisfeld most often having retired for the day—and go down to the basement to listen to records,
copy scores, play the piano, compose (both at the piano and at the worktable), and read manuscripts and books. He was home by eleven and asleep in his cot by a quarter past. There were interruptions—the movies, weekend wanderings with Ivan, and sometimes he would run into Al and Emma having a late supper as Al came off shift.

Claude had noticed that the kitchenette was now scrupulously clean and orderly, and that there were some new cooking utensils. Al, it turned out, was a good cook.

"I don't know how you do it in such a tiny space," Emma said one night.

"Just keep it organized," Al said with a shrug. He shook a frying pan, turned a knob, peered into a pot, and began to set out dishes. "Try a little taste?" he asked Claude.

"Sure."

Al turned his back and went to work.

Emma, with a regular-sized bottle of beer, was in a cheerful mood. "We did well today. We both had trips to Idlewild, and Al picked up two cases of oil uptown at half price."

"Remember that guy under the overpass?" Al said. "Ran into eight cases somehow." He gave a little laugh. "He's all right, though. Might get him to do a ring job. The car could use it."

"How is Mr. Weisfeld?" Emma asked. "I saw him in the street. He always looks so pale."

"He's fine. He just doesn't go out much."

"Well, give him my regards. Thank him again for all he's doing. I still can't believe you're in that fancy school."

Al turned and presented the food. Shaved ham with redeye gravy, greens with butter, and hash brown potatoes with bits of onion and green pepper. All three of them fell to.

"Damn, that's good," Emma said.

Al presented four biscuits that had been warming in a pot on the hot plate. "Make biscuits in a pot. I used to watch my momma."

"Where is your momma?" Claude asked, savoring a bite of ham.

"Oh, she dead. My daddy too. Long time ago." He ate fastidiously, giving the food his complete attention for several moments, and then took a sip of beer. "It's some story," he said, lowering the bottle. "Like in a book."

"What happened?"

He ate some more, then looked out into the middle distance. "They
was out in the field, chopping cotton. The sky was getting dark and the bossman, he standing there in the wind, feeling a few little bitty drops of rain, he get mad and starts telling everybody to work faster. See, he wants to make the quota and go on back to the house. He got this little leather stick he's always swatting in the palm of his hand, you know? Ain't a real horsewhip, it's more like a lady's horsewhip. So he starts moving through the rows, hitting people on their feet, on their ankles, shouting at them hurry up, he ain't got his hat."

"My God," Emma said, sitting up.

"Well, that bossman, he start hitting my momma's feet, and he don't know my daddy's in the next row. Now my daddy, he was a big man, and I mean big. They called him Bear. His name was Sam but everybody called him Bear. He rose up and told the bossman stop hitting my momma. Bossman call him a no-account nigger and hit him right across the face with that leather stick." He stopped, ate a bite of food, and looked first at Emma, then at Claude. "Now, you got to remember my daddy standing there with the cotton knife right in his hand. Bossman ain't got no time to unbuckle everything and get out his gun. Can't do it if my daddy make a move. By now there's people standing around watching, see what's gonna happen. It's raining. My daddy throw his knife on the ground. Bossman try to go for his gun, but my daddy is on him in a flash, just pounding away with his great big fists look like two smoked hams. He just beat the Jesus out of that man, sloshing around in the mud and the rain, bringing him down. And my momma screaming at him to stop, pulling his rope belt as hard as she could, trying to get him off that white man." He took another sip of beer and stared at the bottle. "So all that hollering brought another bossman, come over from the other side of the field to see what's going on. Now this one has his gun
out.
He lifts it up and points it straight at my daddy. My daddy just stand there, Momma behind him on her knees, moaning. Now everybody waiting for him to pull the trigger, and he's just about to when suddenly a bolt of lightning comes out of the sky with thunder like the end of the world, and that lightning go
straight to the gun.
Can you beat that? It goes straight to the gun, like it was aimed. Course, I suppose it was the iron really, but anyway that second bossman drop dead as a stone."

Both Claude and Emma had forgotten about their food and sat still as statues. Al took some greens on his fork.

"So what happened?" Claude asked. "I mean, your parents?"

"The Klan got them two nights later. Strung them up by the river."

There was complete silence. They stared at Al for what seemed a long time, until the faintest wisp of a smile appeared on the black man's mouth. Emma immediately burst into laughter and almost fell off her stool.

"What? What?" Claude cried.

Now Al was laughing, nodding his head.

"Oh, you had me," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "You had me good."

"What?" Claude repeated.

"Just funning, boy," Al said gently. "A little entertainment. Just a way to pass the time."

"You mean..."

"My momma died of sugar in the blood. My daddy was a drunk, broke his head on the toilet in the back of a bar one night. That's the way it really was."

Claude had buried (but not, of course, completely extinguished) the memories of his early childhood—the vague nausea, the loneliness, weakness, and vulnerability. Fear of those old ghosts drove him, without his knowing it, into a dependency on ritual, and into a highly compartmentalized way of life. If there was anything remotely like a center to his existence, it was Weisfeld and the studio below the store, but his mother was separate, school was entirely separate, his love for Catherine was both hidden and separate, the movies were a world unto themselves—and it was as if he were a slightly different person in each setting. He intuitively sensed that this was a good thing, that the compartmentalization worked to protect the most valuable and personal source of strength he had, music. Only when he was in music awash in it, could he feel truly secure Only music had the power to lift him out of himself and relieve him of the burden of himself. There were moments with Catherine moments in the movies moments while reading a book or chasing down ideas with Ivan moments of silence in the mysteriously calming and strengthening presence of Weisfeld—but these were evanescent, transitory echoes of what he got directly from music.