Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

IN MAY 1937, the Hindenburg airship burst into flames, killing its captain and thirty-four others. Not long thereafter I completed work on your new theremin. It was perhaps the most perfect thing I had ever made. The cabinet was made of ash; the circuitry was gold, green and silver. Its secrets were concealed within two hinged compartments. From the outside it was a simple wedge on four legs. The pitch antenna rose in a short straight line. The volume antenna looped at the left side, esoteric and in its way ornate. Where the performer stands, there was a small dial: ten numbered settings for ten different timbres. I had not just made the theremin sing more beautifully — I had given it many voices. Darker, higher, deeper, an instrument of caves, or of woods, or of roads less travelled by.

I sent it to you with a note, with a leonid :

Clara this gentle hid-en hum

all might reach us in the end

You sent me back an invitation to your performance in Philadelphia on August 14.

You wrote, I hope you’ll come. Bring a friend .

I rang Schillinger. “Clara’s playing in Philadelphia.”

He said: “So?”

“So I’m going.”

“Lev, are you sure—”

“Yes I’m sure.”

“Lev. You still—”

“So come with me, Schillinger. Come with me.”

I would have gone with Pash but I did not want a defender, a guardian; I wanted simply a companion. Someone to go with me on this journey. I hired a car. Before leaving the apartment I looked at myself in the mirror: forty-one years old. I was a whole man. I was small, steady, younger than my years. I was an inventor and a spy. I loved Russia and Clara Reisenberg.

On the drive to Philadelphia, we talked about old times. We talked about Vinogradov, little Yolanda and the Bolotines, that New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn. We were somewhere in the middle of the journey, near Trenton, when he craned in his seat and said, “So. Tonight.”

I waited a moment. “Yes?”

“What’s the piece?”

I lifted my gaze from the road. “Bloch’s ‘Schelomo.’ ”

He nodded his head. “Ah,” he said, in a way that was at once friendly and short.

“Do you know it?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

“And she’s playing the theremin?”

“Yes,” I said. “My new theremin.”

He laughed, a little forcedly. “I wish I were so lucky!”

The car was silent. We listened to the clatter of stones on the underside of the carriage.

“Are you still in love with her, Leon?”

I watched the highway into Pennsylvania.

He rubbed his face, then glanced back at me. “You’re handsome and clever. You’re self-possessed. Generous.” He was trying to smile at me, but I was not meeting his eyes. “There are ten thousand women who would gladly join their particles to yours.”

He was still trying to get me to look at him. I would not.

“But then I don’t need to remind you of that,” Schillinger said finally.

We passed a sign on the side of the road, showing a moose, intimating that a moose could step out into the middle of the highway. I wondered whether I would be agile enough to drive around it or whether it would be better to stop the car.

Schillinger took a breath and said, abruptly, “Lev, it is dangerous to hope for impossibilities.”

I felt the flick of lines along the middle of the road.

“Impossibilities?” I said.

“That’s right.”

I said, still without looking at him, “Is that what you tell Frances?”

LATER, AS WE TOOK OUR places in the auditorium, I thought of the first time we saw you play. I had sat in Peveril Hall with Schillinger. We watched the violinist and her sister. This was a different night, now. I knew what you would unveil in my heart. I knew the way the curtain would lift and how we would face each other in this midnight hall, a wind blowing between us.

You would play the most perfect instrument I had made.

There was a large crowd, an orchestra’s hundred chairs and music stands. The musicians came and took their seats. The first violinist. Then you, slim and straight, in a white gown fringed with gold. You shook the hand of the first violinist. I wondered if you felt something, shaking hands with your former aspiration. Your hair was pulled back, your face like a drawing. A spotlight illuminated my theremin. You had painted over the ashwood, made it black. You took your place behind the device. DZEEEEOOOoo , very softly, and you held your hand suspended in the air. Somewhere on the reverse of the cabinet, a light glowed. This was another new invention; a signal for perfect A. The musicians tuned their instruments. You looked over your shoulder at the first violinist, at the line of double bassists. I sat with Schillinger in the darkness.

You were there to perform “Schelomo,” by Ernest Bloch, a rhapsody for cello and orchestra. You presented the complete cello part on theremin. It is a composition of sustained and devastating yearning, a wavering conversation between one voice and the ensemble. Your right hand was a fist. You opened it one finger at a time, asking and withdrawing. The soloist must play in angles, edges, skirting old melodies. You did not close your eyes until the third section, as if suddenly the music was asking something else of you. Only your hands were in motion. In the heart of that hall, you were utterly solitary. I could not have given myself to you even if I had tried.

You used only one of the theremin’s voices. And you had painted it black.

At the end of the performance, awkwardly, the conductor turned and made a short speech. He acknowledged the director of the symphony, the attendance of philanthropist Howard Gersheim. Then you said, into a lousy microphone, “And I wish to thank my husband, Robert Rockmore.”

LAVINIA WAS MUCH MORE beautiful than you.

In the second floor of my home she stood on the terpsitone stage and at first she didn’t know what to do with it. Moving, she listened to the way the mechanism’s pitch changed. She was alert and present. She made the beginning of something. Then she stepped down and the next girl got up. I turned to Henry Solomonoff. “Who was that?”

“Lavinia Williams.”

I said her name back: “Lavinia Williams.”

Somehow Solomonoff had become the manager of the American Negro Ballet. He went in to recommend accompanists; he left as their manager. Since then he had not stopped pestering me to bring the dancers to West 54th Street to show them the terpsitone. I told him no. No, Henry . I was living underwater, with dreams of floods and taxes. No one had used the stage since you. Then finally one bare morning I did not know why I was saying no, why I was being ruled by dreams, by memory. I brought nine tall graceful women into my home, the vases filled with flowers. (There were also two graceful men.)

Lavinia was one of them. Later, I took the dancers into the kitchen and poured them each a glass of cold water. “Spasiba,” she said, Thank you , and I gave a little turn, surprised.

“Pazhalsta,” I replied.

She wore a thin dress, lightly violet. “ Do you use the dance stage yourself? ” She was still speaking in Russian.

“ I’m sorry?”

“ Do you dance on it? To play it?” Lavinia had no earrings, no bracelets, no necklaces, no rings. I found myself thinking of Schillinger’s theories, his multiple formulas of beauty.

She moved her head so; and so; specifically, as if always considering.