The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists

To James Myhre

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Acknowledgments

About the Author

The transcendent music is that of the asylums. There are four of them, made up of illegitimate and orphaned girls whose parents are not in a position to raise them. They are brought up at the expense of the state and trained solely to excel in music. Moreover, they sing like angels and play the violin, the flute, the organ, the oboe, the cello and the bassoon; in short, there is no instrument, however unwieldy, that can frighten them. They are cloistered like nuns. It is they alone who perform, and about forty girls take part in each concert. I vow to you that there is nothing so diverting as the sight of a young and pretty nun in white habit, with a bunch of pomegranate blossoms over her ear, conducting the orchestra and beating time with all the grace and precision imaginable.

—Charles de Brosses

an eighteenth-century visitor to Venice

I
T BEGAN SIMPLY,
a malicious prank or a robbery pinned on the wrong person, nothing to take too seriously.

It began with the disappearance of a musical instrument.

“But why would you even want another bassoon, Nicky? You already have four.”

My friend Nicola Gibbons was calling me from Venice. She’d left London just four days ago to attend a symposium on women musicians of Vivaldi’s time. If she’d had a lesser voice, I would have hardly been able to hear her. For it was an evening in late October and a violent wind knocked tree limbs against the house and sent dustbin lids spinning. A thin rain spat and spewed.

“Of course I didn’t
take
the bloody bassoon, Cassandra, but the fact is, it’s gone missing while supposedly in my possession, and it’s a period piece, priceless and irreplaceable, and I’m apparently responsible.”

I repressed a sigh. Why was she calling
me
? I couldn’t exactly tell her that she was interrupting a very pleasant evening, one that I very much deserved after the trip I’d just made. Since I travel constantly and keep my attic room at Nicky’s house in London only as a base, I had been thrilled to find myself arriving as she was leaving, and to discover that I was quite alone in her house, with the prospect of a week to enjoy her good wines, her library and her specially made large bathtub.

“But they’re not planning to put you in jail or anything, are they?” I interrupted her, hoping she would come to the point.

“No, I’m not really even under arrest. But the police have searched my room several times and questioned me pretty thoroughly and now they’re telling me I can’t leave the country, or else I really will be arrested. They took my passport.”

I had the electric fire on and a small whisky on the coffee table. I took a sip, and then another as Nicky ranted on, and flipped through a magazine on my lap. Beside me on the sofa sat a pile of books in Spanish. I was supposed to review them for an editor at a large London publishing house. I’d picked them up from Simon earlier today.

“Most of them are just literary novels,” Simon had sighed. “But here’s one that looks promising. It’s by a protégé of Gloria de los Angeles. It was described to me at the Frankfurt Book Fair as ‘the erotic and spiritual struggles of a group of eighteenth-century Venezuelan nuns.’”

I’d put
Lovers and Virgins
on top of the pile, along with a book called
Bashō in Lima
, which seemed to be about a woman of Japanese-Peruvian descent making a pilgrimage back to Peru. The other novels had less riveting covers, and one, at least, was about Latin American politics. “I hate to be an unfeeling Philistine,” Simon had said, “but these books about military coups and disappeared people don’t sell anymore. Sexy nuns, well, that’s another story. Let me have your reports in a couple of weeks, darling.”

It felt good to be back to some sort of work, and good to be back in London. I had just returned from an unfortunate excursion to several of the more distant tropical islands with a naturalist who was studying turtle migration. Although charming, Angela had been rather more scientific than amorous and while I had learned a great deal about turtles, I’d also badly bruised my hip after stumbling over some rocks along the shore. Not only had the fall put me out of temper, it had also caused me to crush some extremely rare turtle eggs, putting Angela out of temper with me as well.

I was looking forward to a quiet autumn, nursing my still-painful hip and sniffing around for something reasonably lucrative to translate. Although
Bashō in Lima
tantalized, I put it aside for the heftier novel. Translation paid by the word, which was unfortunate when a book seemed to be full of haiku and white space.

“Shall I call your solicitor?” I interrupted Nicky finally, when she showed signs of coming to the end of excoriating the Italian police and judicial system.

“For the moment I’d prefer to handle this myself. At least until I can sort out the real story and see what my responsibility…” Her normally booming voice dropped to a whisper. It seemed someone had come into her room.

“Responsibility? But you said you didn’t…”

“No, I didn’t take the fiendish
fagotto
!” Her words seemed to be directed to whoever was in the room.

“Really, Nicky,” I worried. “Do you think you should be talking to them like that?”

“Fagotto
is bassoon, Cassandra.” Her voice was now impatient. Her visitor had apparently gone out again. Nicky often had that effect on people. “I need you to come to Venice, and I especially need you to bring some books and papers from my study. I’ll tell you which ones.” She began to rattle off a list as I searched for my pen. I scribbled the items on the cover of
Lovers and Virgins
. Nicky made me read them back to her: a biography, a music program, some copies of articles and interviews, which I’d find in a file cabinet. Additionally I was to find and bring an envelope marked PRIVATE and a largish sum of money from a safe hidden in the study. I would find the combination in a jar of lentils in the kitchen.

“But can’t I just send all this? It would be one thing if you were in jail, Nicky. But you know I’ve just come back from a long trip, and I have to read a whole stack of Latin American books for Simon.”

“I
am
practically in jail. With
her
watching me all the time. Even professional jealousy is preferable to this kind,” she hissed.

“But…”

“For god’s sakes, lass,” Nicky shouted, her Glaswegian accent suddenly strong, “Can’t you understand that I
need
you?”

As always, Nicky as a Scottish warrior queen suddenly down on her luck was irresistible.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said.

I always liked going into Nicky’s study, but I rarely visited it without her present. Although she wouldn’t have minded, my reticence was a holdover from the days when it had been Olivia Wulf’s study. By the time I met Olivia, she seemed several hundred years old to me, as clever as a snake and as refined as a string of pearls. Her cultured air intimidated me. Nicky had grown up in an intellectual if impoverished family; the only person in my family who had read a book was my Aunt Eavan in Chicago. No one was artistic, and no one played music, though my father did sing, and in a lovely tenor, too, when he was in his cups.

The study’s walls were nearly covered with bookshelves, but here and there hung framed sketches and photographs of both Olivia and Nicky. Tall, with her smooth blond hair pulled back in a low knot, in strapless gowns and pearls, Olivia looked polished and stunning. Nicky, on the other hand, never looked polished. What I’d always liked about Nicky was her lack of proportion and sedateness. It wasn’t just her size; it was her moon face, her big hands and feet, the curls that shot out in auburn corkscrews from her head. She was never afraid to look ugly, and she did look ugly, quite often. But then again, she could look gorgeous, and these performance photographs (bassoon in hand) showed it. Hair swept up, shoulders bare, cleavage deep and compelling. She had a propensity for hats, capes and tall boots, for velvet and satin, for colors like maroon and violet and rose-mauve. Her eyelashes were long, and her voice, when not rattling the windows, was rich with possibility. She had never been short of admirers, male and female.

In her youth Olivia had been beautiful, and she too had had many lovers, along with an apparently long-suffering husband who was a musician as well. He’d been arrested in 1937 while on tour in Berlin and had had a heart attack while being “questioned.” Nicky had told me that one of Olivia’s old flames managed to get her out of Vienna and to London. Her twenty-year-old son, Jakob, was supposed to come with her, but at the last minute he’d disappeared. Olivia always thought it was because he hadn’t wanted to leave his fiancée, Elizabeth, who wasn’t Jewish. He died at Dachau in 1940 from pneumonia. Olivia had never been able to find out what happened to Elizabeth. Nicky became the grandchild she’d never had.

The photographs showed that Olivia had successfully made a new life for herself as a teacher and member of the London Symphony Orchestra. But that life was drawing to a close when I came to stay in the attic room. In her last years she seemed only old and forgetful, needing Nicky’s constant attention.

Six months ago Olivia died and left everything to Nicky.

The phone rang again while I was staring at the photographs. When I picked up the receiver, a woman’s voice said, in a British accent that was good but hardly perfect, “Your friend Nicola asked me to call.” She did not identify herself. The wind outside made it difficult to hear her clearly.

“Is anything wrong?”

“Sorry, sorry. No reason for alarm. It’s only that she feels perhaps she was hasty. Now everything is solved, there’s no need to come.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Is Nicky there?”

“No, she’s packing to return to England. Everything is fine.” Her vehemence was unmistakably false, and I didn’t believe a word she’d said.

“Well, that’s good news,” I said. “Good-bye.”

I put the phone down and continued collecting the things Nicky had asked for.

Some were easy. The biography of a well-known and now dead conductor was right on the shelf where it should have been, and, stuffed in a box with other programs, was one from an international Vivaldi festival that had taken place in Venice a few years ago, on the 250th anniversary of Vivaldi’s death. But the copies of articles Nicky wanted were harder to locate. Though Nicky had a filing system that worked for her, my own mind was organized differently, and I looked for something to do with bassoons before coming across a cache of articles in a hanging file labeled “Orphanages of Venice.” The hanging file was the right one, and I pulled from it a manila folder labeled “Musicians of the Pietà.”

Most of the articles were by an Andrew McManus, who lived in Winnipeg, but a few were in Swedish and German. There was also a waggishly titled interview with Nicky herself from a British music journal: “The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists.” In the accompanying photo, Nicky was holding a Venetian mask, as well as a period bassoon, and looking a bit coy.

Nicky, when asked, always said she chose to play the bassoon because it was so large. Nobody messed her about after school when she was carrying an instrument whose hard case doubled as a weapon. But to me, the bassoon seemed to suit her because it was more a speaking instrument than a singing one. It didn’t trill or soar like the flute or clarinet; it ruminated, low-pitched and sometimes argumentative; it bubbled with ideas, it sighed and laughed. Other instruments might cry; the bassoon wept quietly, even glumly. More often it just discussed the whole question thoroughly.