Theophilus North (25 page)

I sat down. There was no possibility of his shaking hands with the lowest menial at the Newport Casino.

“Mr. Fenwick—I shall call you that at the beginning of our conversation, then I shall call you Charles—Eloise tells me that you have spent much time in France and have had several years of tutoring. Probably all you need is a few weeks putting some polish on the irregular verbs. Eloise certainly surprised me. She could get an invitation tomorrow to one of those châteaux for a weekend and pass the test with flying colors. As you probably know, French people of real distinction refuse to have anything to do with Americans who speak their language incorrectly. They think we're savages. In a few moments I am going to ask you if you would like to work with me on this matter, but first I think we should know each other a little better. Eloise and your mother have told me a number of things about you: aren't there some questions you'd like to put to me about myself?”

Silence. I held the silence so long that presently he spoke. His manner was offhand and freighted with condescension. “Did you go to Yale . . . is it true that you went to Yale?”

“Yes.”

Same prolonged pause.

“If you went to Yale, why are you working at the Casino?”

“To make some money.”

“You don't look . . .
poor.”

I laughed. “Oh, yes, I'm very poor, Charles—but cheerful.”

“Did you belong to any of those fraternities . . . and clubs they have there?”

“I was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and of the Elizabethan Club. I was not a member of any one of the Senior Societies.”

For the first time he glanced at me. “Did you try to get into one?”

“Trying has nothing to do with it. They did not invite me.”

Another glance. “Did you feel very badly about it?”

“Maybe they were wise not to take me in. Maybe I wouldn't have suited them at all. Clubs are meant for men who have a lot in common. What kind of clubs would you like to be a member of, Charles?” Silence. “The best clubs are built around hobbies. For instance there's a club in your own town Baltimore—a hundred years old—that I think must be the most delightful in the world and the hardest to get into.”

“What club is that?”

“It's called the ‘Catgut Club.' ” He couldn't believe his ears. “It's always been known that there's a close affinity between medicine and music. In Berlin there's a symphony orchestra made up of physicians alone. Around your Johns Hopkins Medical School there are more great doctors than in any place of its size in the world. Only the most eminent professors belong to the ‘Catgut,' but they're also pianists, violinists, violists, cellists, and possibly a clarinetist. Every Tuesday night they sit down and play chamber music.”

“What?”

“Chamber music. Do you know what that is?”

A strange thing was happening. Charles's face already a mottled red and white had turned scarlet. He was blushing furiously.

Suddenly I remembered—with a bang—that to very young Americans the word “chamber,” through association with chamber pots, was invested with the horror and excitement and ecstasy of the “forbidden”—of things not said openly; and every “forbidden” word belongs to a network of words far more devastating than “chamber.” Charles Fenwick at sixteen was going through a phase that he should have outgrown by the age of twelve. Of course! He had had tutors all his life; he had little association with boys of his own age who “aerate” that suppressed matter in giggles and whispers and horseplay and shouting. In one area of his development he was “arrested.”

I explained what chamber music was and then I laid another trap for him to see if my conjecture was right.

“There's another club, also very select, at Saratoga Springs, whose members own racehorses and bet on races, but seldom ride them. There's an old joke about them; some people call it the ‘Horses and Asses Club'—the members don't sit on their horses, they sit on their asses.”

It worked. The crimson flag went up. At chapel services in the school where I had taught, the Bible readings occasionally reminded us that Abraham or Saul or Job had lost a large number of asses. The air in the auditorium would become tense; in the seats reserved for the smaller boys there would be agonies of suppressed laughter, convulsion, and desperate coughing. I went on serenely. “Which club would you rather belong to?”

“What?”

“The Baltimore doctors wouldn't give a pin to get into the millionaires' club at Saratoga Springs and the horse-owners wouldn't be caught dead listening to a lot of chamber music. . . . But I'm wasting your time. Are you ready to say that you'd be willing to work with me on the finer points of the French language? Be perfectly frank, Charles.”

He swallowed and said, “Yes, sir.”

“Fine! When next you're in France you and Eloise may be asked to some noble's country house for a pleasant weekend and you'll want to feel secure about the conversation and all that . . . . I'll sit here and wait until your mother returns. I don't want to interrupt your practice any longer.” I put out my hand; he shook it and rose. I grinned. “Don't tell that little story about Saratoga Springs where it might cause any embarrassment; it's all right just among men.” And I nodded in dismissal.

Mrs. Fenwick returned followed by Eloise.

“Charles feels that he'd like to try a little coaching, Mrs. Fenwick.”

“Oh, I'm so relieved!”

“I think Eloise had a large part in it.”

“Can I come to the classes, too?”

“Eloise, your French is quite good enough. Charles wouldn't open his mouth if you were there. But you can be sure that
I'll
miss you. Now I want to discuss some details with your mother.” Eloise sighed and drifted off.

“Mrs. Fenwick, have you ten minutes? I want to lay a plan before you.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. North.”

“Ma'am, are you fond of music?”

“As a girl I seriously hoped to become a concert pianist.”

“Who are your favorite composers?”

“It used to be Bach, then it was Beethoven, but for some time I have become fonder and fonder of Mozart. Why do you ask?”

“Because a little-known aspect of Mozart's life may help you to understand what is making life difficult for Charles.”

“Charles and Mozart!”

“Both suffered from an unfortunate deprivation in their adolescence.”

“Mr. North, are you in your senses?”

(I must now interrupt this account for a brief declaration. The reader has not failed to notice that I, Theophilus, did not hesitate to invent fabulous information for my own amusement or for the convenience of others. I am not given to telling either lies or the truth to another's disadvantage. The passage that follows concerning Mozart's letters is the easily verifiable truth.)

“Ma'am, half an hour ago you assured me that you were not a bashful-minded woman. What I am about to say requires my discussing what many people would regard as vulgar and even distasteful matters. Of course, you may draw this conversation to a close at any moment you wish, but I think it will throw some light on why Charles is a closed-in and unhappy young man.”

She stared at me in silence for a moment, then clutched the arms of her chair and said, “Go on.”

“Readers of Mozart's letters have long known of a few that he addressed to a cousin living in Augsburg. Those that have been published contain many asterisks indicating that deletions have been made. No editor or biographer would print the whole, feeling that they would distress the reader and leave a stain on the image of the composer. These letters to his
Bäsle
—a German and Austrian diminutive for a female cousin—are one long chain of childish indecencies. Not long ago the famous author Stefan Zweig bought them and printed them, with a preface, for private distribution among his friends. I have not seen the brochure, but a musicologist I know, living in Princeton, gave me a detailed account of them and of Stefan Zweig's introduction. They are what is called scatological—having to do with the bodily functions. As I was told, there is little or no allusion to sexual matters; it is all ‘bathroom humor.' They were written in the composer's middle and late teens. How can one explain that Mozart who matured so early could descend to such infantile jokes? The beautiful letters to his father, preparing him for the news of his mother's death in Paris, were written not long after. Herr Zweig points out that Mozart never had a normal boyhood. Before he was ten he was composing and performing music all day and far into the night. His father was exhibiting him about Europe as a wonderchild. You remember that he climbed on Queen Marie Antoinette's lap. I have not only been a teacher at a boys' school, I have earned my living during the summers as counselor at camps and have had to sleep in the same tent with seven to ten urchins. Boys pass through a phase when all these ‘forbidden' matters obsess them—are excruciatingly funny and exciting and, of course, alarming. Girls are supposed to be given to giggling, but I assure you boys between nine and twelve will giggle for an entire half hour if some little physiological accident takes place. They give vent to the anxiety surrounding the tabu by sharing it in the herd. But Mozart—if I may put it figuratively—never played baseball in a corner lot, never went swimming on a boy scout picnic.” I paused. “Your son Charles was cut off from his contemporaries and all this perfectly natural childish adjustment to our bodily nature was driven underground; and has festered.”

She addressed me coldly, “My son Charles has never uttered a vulgar word.”

“Mrs. Fenwick, that's the point!”

“How do you know that something is
festering?
” There was a sneer in her voice. She was a very nice woman, but she was being hard pushed.

“By sheer accident. In our conversation he gave me pretty hard treatment. He asked me if I had belonged to certain extremely exclusive clubs at Yale, and when I told him I had not, he tried to humiliate me. But I have had a lot of experience. I was beginning to think very well of him; but I could see that he was living in a capsule of anxiety.”

She put her hands over her face. After a moment she regained possession of herself and said in a low voice, “Go on, please!” I told her about the musical club in Baltimore and about Charles's crimson reaction. I told her that I had made an experiment and invented a club for card-players which offered rewards for the best and the worst players called the “Tops and Bottoms Club” and aroused the same response. I explained that for boys—and probably girls—during certain years the English language was a mine-field sown with explosives—words, dynamite; I said that I had remembered Mozart's letters and that Charles had been brought up by tutors, cut off from the life usually led by boys. I said that he was entrapped in a stage of development which he should have outgrown years before and that the trap was
fear
and that what she had called his snobbery was his escape into a world where no shattering word was ever spoken. I had asked him if he would like to work with me in the hope of bringing his French up to Eloise's standard—and that he had agreed to it and that before he left he had shaken my hand and had looked me in the eye.

“Mrs. Fenwick, you may remember Macbeth's question to the doctor concerning Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking: ‘Canst thou not . . . Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?' ”

With no tone of reproach she said, “But you are not a doctor, Mr. North.”

“No. What Charles needs is a friend with a certain experience in these matters. You cannot be sure that doctors are also potential friends.”

“You believe that Mozart outgrew his ‘childishness'?”

“No. No man does. He outgrows most of his anxiety; the rest he turns into laughter. I doubt that Charles even knows what it is to smile.”

“Oh, Mr. North, I've hated every word you've said. But I think I can see that you are probably right. Will you accept Charles as a pupil?”

“I must make a proviso. You must discuss it with Mr. Fenwick and Father Walsh. I could teach French syntax to Tom, Dick, and Harry, but now that I have glimpsed Charles's predicament, I cannot spend all those hours without trying to help. I couldn't teach algebra—as a friend of mine was paid to do—to a girl who was suffering from religious mania; she was secretly wearing hair shirts and sticking nails into her body. I want your permission to do a thing that I would not dream of doing without your permission. I want to introduce into each lesson a ‘dynamite word' or two. If I had a student whose mind and heart was absorbed by birds, I would build French lessons about ostriches and starlings. Learning takes wings when it's related to what's passing in the student's inner life. Charles's inner life is related to a despairing effort to grow up into a man's world. His snobbery is related to this knot inside him. He won't realize it, but my lessons would be based on these fantasies of his—of social grandeur and of the frightening world of the tabu.”

She had shut her eyes, but opened them again—”Excuse me; what is it you want?”

“A message from you that I may occasionally use low earthy images in the lessons. I want you to trust me not to resort to the prurient and the salacious. I don't know Charles. He may develop an antagonism against me and report to you and to Father Walsh that I have a vulgar mind. You probably know that ailing patients
also
cling to their illnesses.”

She rose. “Mr. North, this has been a painful conversation for me. I must think it all over. You will hear from me. . . . Good morning.”

She extended her hand tentatively. I bowed saying, “If you agree to my proviso, I can meet Charles in the blue tea room behind us for an hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at eight-thirty.”