On the stage he found the members of Mother’s “authentic” ensemble—a string quartet, a bass player, and a chamber organist—taking their instruments out of their cases. The organist was watching the stage manager and a few hands wrestle the ornate and unwieldy organ in place. Little Joe and Big Joe and a few of Joe’s brothers watched the hands grunt and shuffle and count off to each other. One of them was staring at the organist in some kind of disbelief or incredulity. Charles watched everybody watching everybody else.
The first violinist, a rugged-looking man who would not have seemed out of place directing traffic in and out of a placer mine, though quite old, was at his side before he knew it. He asked if Charles was going to hear Caruso, who was singing Don José in the Metropolitan Opera Company’s touring Carmen at the Mission Opera House that night.
“No excitement will be allowed,” said Charles. “Mother says we rehearse and hit the hay.”
“I wonder,” said the old man, “if she means to apply the prohibition to us.” Charles grinned at him in his superbly social way. “I’m not joking,” said the man, rather crossly, looking around in annoyance. He focused on the organ. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Charles agreed. It had been modeled, it was said, on the water organ carved into the pedestal of Theodosius’s Obelisk, built according to Mother’s specifications—that was the official line at any rate—by Moody and Billings in Detroit, a maker better known for their barrel organs, on one of which the organist had been rehearsing.
Referring to this, the old violinist said, “Ernst is delirious.”
No one on the bustling stage dared, it seemed, to enter the limelight, which was focused on two chalked X marks, where Charles and Mother were to stand when singing.
Mother walked into the light.
Was she beautiful, as people told him? Was she daunting, as people told him? Was she inexpressibly kind and sweet beneath the intricately worked armor of hyper-privileged can-do? When they sang the Stabat Mater, they were to seem a single voice, winding in and out of itself, moving away a note or two up or down the scale, or less, usually less, ceaselessly weaving sound, exchanging notes, while the quartet and continuo ticked away like a cosmic clock, or a pedal on a slowly spinning loom . . . his heavenly cherub-treble to “her darkly radiant, and yes, frankly imperial contralto”—the voice of not merely an ascendant United States of America but of a triumphant leader of the tired, old, confused or simply inferior nations of the world, a Statue of Liberty with a world-class voice, sixty years old, four children: Mother. In a way it was embarrassing to think of any part of one’s self as being “sinuous” with one’s mother’s self, not to mention “hauntingly sensuous,” but to hear it, to hear that single voice moving ineluctably toward two and back again to one, one note striving to become a different note, the second note striving to stay as it was—that was an altogether different matter. The voice had evolved and was part of a rising convergence that was very close to God.
Charles knew it and Mother knew it. And they both knew each other knew it.
“Ineluctable,” from the Latin for the struggle to be free or clear of something.
He had looked it up. Everything about it made him uneasy—or frightened him outright. This was why you knew how to talk about baseball and football, and why you took the trouble to be a good shot when killing sickened you. It was perhaps why Father responded to you so warmly, when all the talk on the surface was of more rising convergences, of Christian evolution and fate.
The second violinist played the five notes and Charles shivered. Had the first violinist noticed the shiver? What if he had? The second violinist must have heard them as Charles had. But would it do to ask him? He had to admit it, shivering, that he was afraid to ask. Mother’s intention in the early going was simply to do justice to Scarlatti père, to Alessandro (the father of the keyboard composer known and loved by generations of supple parlor virtuosi such as, for example, Father and Mother, Alexander, Andrew, and Amelia), a genius who had been made out by “the Victorians” to be some kind of villain who’d “nearly destroyed dramatic music.” Mother had commissioned the biography, and one thing led to another . . . and here they were: scholars of music, specialists in the baroque, Mother’s man in Napoli, leading figures in the “authentic practices” movement, seeking on behalf of and with the support of Mother—on her behalf because she was an incontestably great singer and with her support because she was incontestably wealthy—to recreate the way the music made by the Italians and their northern imitators sounded in 1650, in 1700, in 1750 . . . so it was easy, on one hand, to say that the five melancholy notes that had apparently lodged in so many minds were, for Charles, merely pegs to hang his own anxiety on . . . but on the other hand, where had they come from and how had they come by their power?
Mother, in the limelight, sang the five notes, and Charles’s knees wobbled. He felt his rectal muscles loosen and he thought he might piss his pants as well. It was absurd, it was humiliating, and he did not understand it.
Mother was looking directly and intently at him as she spoke: “. . . a trumpeter in the band representing the Building Trades Council—” (described for her friends who were unfamiliar with San Francisco labor politics as a group of unions that passed knowledge and membership along only to the sons of union members with a guild-like sense of mastery and exclusion), “—played them in a lull, and a trumpeter in the band representing the San Francisco Labor Council—” (who sneered at such feudalism and were drawing dangerously near the controversial if not outright suicidal acceptance of negroes, the Chinese, the what-have-you, Indians from the Stone Age!), “—picked it up. It was so forlorn and lovely, but it seemed to be a battle cry, because the bands began to move in opposite directions, so as to meet somewhere on Union and do this tiresome thing which is all the rage now, march into each other’s ranks and fight out it, note for note, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” versus “La Marseillaise.” Whose tune will prevail and why? What a question! But those five calling notes—so strange! So enchanting!”
The house lights had gone down without Charles noticing. Mother spoke to him as if in a play in a dream. Plays within plays within plays—there was no end to it. No beginning. And that was the question: the question that could not be answered. One recognizes oneself, and in that recognition, listen closely, Charles, my poor darling boy, in that recognition one is spontaneously able to recognize all the other selves in the universe. One sees them, literally, as one encounters them, and extrapolates the infinite rest. Those which seem “rare and strange” are no different than those which seem ordinary: they are all complete and particularly themselves. And there, dear Charles, is where we come to ruin and sorrow as human beings. We see the particular and cannot conceive the whole, or sense the whole and cannot remember the particular. We cannot hold them both in our minds at once. It is impossible. Think of the rhomboid your mathematics tutor drew for you: the crystallographer Herr Necker’s cube. The soul tears itself to pieces knowing that it cannot know.
But she was not speaking. He was not hearing. He was not even thinking. She was gesturing impatiently for him to join her. Tonight was a run-through. The second movement was all his: if he was bad tonight, he would be good tomorrow. God help him if he was good tonight. But good or bad, it would be over. Then it was either to bed or to Caruso.
When the strange noises began . . . early in the morning, Charles snug, cozy, dreaming deep meaningful dreams, meaningfully complex psychological dreams, not the insipid nightmares of a little boy . . . and the house to shake, and things to fall, with the discrete recognizable sounds of falling now and smashing to pieces later—he thought he could hear the falling of the object through the air, or its creaking away from its place, and only after some time the shattering, breaking noise, but it is certainly possible that he was still in some way dreaming—and finally the house to seem to jump down on its foundation and collapse, Father had them (Mother, Amelia, Charles, the servants) out on the streets immediately, and it was easy, too easy, to see how you got things done. In the early going it was “frightening,” of course it was, but it was the consequent sadness that Father urged Charles to repel, brutally if he had to. He quoted Montaigne at him, which was something he did under ordinary circumstances