Elise Blackwell - An Unfinished Score

This street was and is a poor one, yet it is lined with alders and a few spindly oaks and is better than some. Many of the houses have porches or at least stoops, marking this a better block than those where the row-house faces drop straight into the sidewalk, a juncture marked by a decaying line of caulk. The dirty house looks as though it was once yellow, but Alex said it had always been that way — never yellow but looking like it used to be.

Its windows draw an inscrutable face: two small eyes and a large off-center mouth, the door a long scar.

Alex could have directed the Philadelphia Orchestra had he wanted to, but he’d sworn to himself that he would never again live in this city, the place that had produced both him and Suzanne. He’d had a real chance — one in three — of leading the New York Philharmonic, but his stubbornness had gotten the better of him. He’d been done in, as he had known he would be, by conducting an all-German program, Wagner to boot. He’d chosen the program out of spite, after some newspaper made a comment about his last name and parentage. He said he’d never regretted his defiance until he met Suzanne, and then it bothered him that they could have lived an hour’s train ride apart instead of enacting the geographic comedy they did.

Suzanne thinks now that if he’d put together another program — Ravel would have been safe in Avery Fisher Hall that year, or Delius, or even Copeland for that matter — he would not have gone down on a plane headed for Chicago. Wagner wasn’t even in his top ten, but he wanted to make a point. To Suzanne he always gave French music, including every recording of Debussy in print, all the Ravel recorded in the last twenty years.

She reaches for the CD case on the floor under Petra’s legs.

Petra grabs the case and flips through it. “What do you want?”

Suzanne considers the question, then says, “Anything by Verdi.”

Though she does not love the melodramatic libretti he grew to rely on, she loves Verdi for saying that he would accept the public’s criticisms and jeers only if he never had to be grateful for their applause. This he said after the flop of the comic opera he wrote the year both of his children and then his wife died.

Suzanne bites the corner tip of her tongue, wincing but not releasing it. She tries not to ask herself if Alex would be alive if he’d given the people what they wanted.

“Dear heart,” Petra whispers, crooking her neck to see in the sideview mirror. “Memory lane is great and all, but I don’t think we should be hanging out in this neighborhood.”

“Forget the Verdi. Play the Kinderszenen . Did I tell you I heard Matsuev play it in Paris? One of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. He played it first, and I almost wanted to leave before the Chopin.”

“You and your Schumann.” Petra laughs.

“He played four encores that night. I doubt I’ll ever see that again.”

They make good time to Princeton, where they pick up Adele, groceries, and wine, in that order.

The phone is ringing as they enter the house. Suzanne feels a chill of brief panic but forces herself to answer.

“I thought I’d get the machine,” says Ben.

Suzanne starts to ask him why he didn’t call her cell, but she stops because she does not want to hear the answer: he doesn’t actually want to talk to her. It’s how he always is in Charleston. She wants to tell him not to bother calling, but that’s not the kind of thing married people can say to each other.

Perhaps it is only because Petra mentioned Schumann when Suzanne and Ben met, but the association has stayed firm in Suzanne’s mind. She wonders now, even, if she married him because of it, at least a little. In those Curtis days, when she thought of Robert and Clara Schumann, it was not the later marriage, when he was institutionalized and being driven mad by a constant A in his ear — an inescapable thrumming note he swore was real — and his virtuoso wife left her children with relatives to support the destitute family by touring. And she did not think much about the mature Clara Schumann, outliving first her husband’s sanity and then, by another forty years, his death. Rather she imagined the young, happily married Schumanns triumphing over the obstructions of Clara’s father, writing scores, using their newspaper to decry the cheap and commercial while championing the innovations of Chopin and shoring up the reputation of Bach, opening their home and their piano to the likes of Johannes Brahms. Suzanne pictured a busy home, filled with children and visitors and new music. She pictured people at the center of the musical world of their day — contributing, shaping, weighing in. They mattered to music, and music mattered to them.

Of course Ben is not like Robert Schumann at any age, though they hold in common three traits: a disrespect for received notions of form, the choice of the cello’s voice to soothe anxiety, and the decision to eschew performance for composition. The story goes that Schumann ruined a hand with a home-rigged metal device he crafted to shorten the time it would take to develop finger independence. It’s a tale often repeated by piano teachers to illustrate the truth that shortcuts don’t work, that music accommodates no cheating.

Yet Suzanne has always suspected the story is a half truth, an excuse authored by Schumann himself, or perhaps by history, to explain his choices. It was well and fine for Clara to play for the public, but Schumann would rather spend those hours composing new music or writing about it.

Suzanne wonders how they did it all. They were, after all, parents of eight children, five of whom survived childhood. It’s always mentioned that way in the history books: five surviving children. Maybe the thinking is that parents in the eighteenth century expected several of their children to die, but can it really be that they didn’t suffer as much? Suzanne has imagined the Schumann household in the days following the death of a child and wondered if music was played and, if so, which pieces and by whom. After she lost the baby, she couldn’t play for six weeks, and she and Ben barely spoke to each other for much longer.

“How’s your mother?” she asks him now.

“The same, okay, and my sister. They said hello.”

Petra takes the bag of groceries from Suzanne and drops a stack of mail on the cypress buffet in front of her.

“How’s Charlie?”

There’s a static-filled pause, as though Ben is calling from across the world.

“I don’t know. I guess he’s okay. He hurt his knee and couldn’t surf for a while, which my mother of course sees as providence.”

Suzanne musters a laugh, which is followed by another long pause. It grows longer, and Suzanne flips through the mail, determined not to speak first, not to carry the conversation that Ben initiated by calling. She sorts junk mail from the bills, which she stacks neatly, then pauses at a manila envelope with no return address and an Illinois postmark.

“I just called to say hello,” Ben says.

“Okay, thanks for that. I’ll see you soon, yeah? Or are you staying?”

“I think I’ll head back early next week, probably drive straight through.”

“Stay longer if you want.” She pulls at the envelope with her teeth, tearing it unevenly open in her hurry.

“I promised Kazuo I’d be back by weekend after this, so maybe I’ll stay on into next week, if you’re sure.”

“All under control here,” Suzanne says flatly.

They say good-bye, and Suzanne extracts the contents of the envelope with a shake and a pull: a music score. It looks like any other computer-generated score except that it is smaller in size than most, with more lines to the page, and so rather elegant, its glossy black notes close together. There are a few penciled notes and instructions, written in two hands — one unknown to Suzanne and the other unmistakably Alex’s.