Stanley Elkin - The Living End

“Pop,” the nurse said.

And poor, dead, puzzled, grounded Ladlehaus heard their mean duet laughter and died again, and once again, and kept on dying, in their presence dying, dying beneath them, with each spike and trough of their laughter.

“His name is Quiz.”

They were near him again, not all but some, and this time the man Quiz did not bother to shoo them off. Ladlehaus sensed arrangement, order. Not the wide barracks of death now—he knew where he was, the child had told him—but rows of folding chairs. He sensed they were chairs, had sensed it that afternoon when a disgruntled Quiz had snapped them into place in the grass, aligned them, something martial in their positioning, discrete as a reviewing stand.

Behind him he heard the gruff shuffle of men’s good shoes as they sidestepped along the cement ledges of the grandstand. (He couldn’t know this, couldn’t smell the lightly perfumed faces of the women or the crisp aftershaves and colognes of the men. For him the soft rustle of the women’s dresses might have been the languid swish of flags in a low wind, the brusque adjustments of the men’s trousers like in-gulps of hushed breath.) He listened carefully, but could not make out the words of the adults.

“After the recital my daddy is taking us to Howard Johnson’s. I’m going to have a coffee ice cream soda.”

“Coffee ice cream keeps me up.”

They’re some more of his accomplices, Ladlehaus thought. They’re going to take me for another ride.

Then a woman made an announcement. He listened for some quaver of theatricality in the voice that would give her away, reveal her as the “nurse” in a different role. Talk always sounded like talk, never like a speech. Something read aloud or memorized or even willfully extemporaneous could never pass for the flat, halting, intimate flow of unmanaged monologue or conversation. Even a man on the radio, scriptless, and talking apparently as he might talk among his friends in a lunchroom, sounded compromised by the weight of his thousand listeners. Even a child at prayer did. But the woman was marvelous. Ladlehaus had to admire the cast Quiz had assembled. She wanted to thank Miss Martin and Miss Boal for their generous and untiring assistance in putting together tonight’s program, extending right down to helping the students tune their instruments. She mustn’t forget to thank the principal, Dr. Mazlish, for opening up the facilities of the high school to the Community Association of Schools of Arts or CASA, as it had come to be known. She particularly wanted to thank the parents for encouraging and, she supposed, at times insisting that the children practice their instruments. And, as coordinator for the program, now in its third year, she particularly wanted to thank the children themselves for the devotion they showed to their music and for their willingness to share their accomplishments with the good audience of parents, relatives, and friends who had come out to hear them tonight. Tonight’s recital was only the first. There would be three others with different young performers during the course of the summer. She regretted that the dates for these had not yet been settled or they would have been printed on the back of the program. Speaking of the program, she said, Angela Kinds and Mark Koehler, though listed, would be unable to perform this evening. They would be rescheduled for one of the recitals later in the summer. In the event of inclement weather, she added, arrangements would be made to hold those indoors.

She was magnificent. It was perfectly obvious to Ladlehaus that she had done the whole thing working from small white note cards held discreetly in her right hand.

He had forgotten about music, forgotten harmony, the grand actuality of the reconciled. Forgotten accord and congruence—all the snug coups of correspondence. He did not remember balance. Proportion had slipped his mind and he’d forgotten that here was where the world dovetailed with self, where self tallied with sympathy and distraction alike. He had forgotten dirge and dead-march, scherzo, rondo, jig and reel. He had forgotten the civilized sound of a cello, or that violins indeed sounded like the woe of gypsies. He had not remembered the guitar, lost the sound of flutes, had no recall for the stirring, percussive thump in melody—all the gay kindling points of blood, the incredible flexibility of a piano. What he had for eyes wept what he had for tears.

A child played “Lightly Row.” He wept. They had Waxman’s “The Puzzle,” Gesanbuch’s “Sun of My Soul.” He wept. Bartok’s “Maypole Dance” was played, Lully’s Gavotte. There was Bach’s Prelude in F, Chopin’s Mazurka in B flat Major, Bohm’s “Gypsy” and Copland’s “The Cat and the Mouse.” He wept for all of them. One of the advanced students—he knew they were students now; professionals would have played better, actors not as well—gave them—for it was “them” now too, the dead man subsumed with the living—Brower’s Three Etudes, and Ladlehaus sighed, his moods flagrant, ventriloquized by the homeopathic instance of the music, the dead man made generous, tolerant, supportive of all life’s magnificent displacements. Why, I myself am a musician, he thought, my sighs music, my small luxurious whimpers, my soul’s high tempo, its brisk tattoo and call to colors. There is a God, the man who had spoken to Him thought, and murmured, “It’s beautiful. The Lord is with me.”

And He was. He lay over Ladlehaus’s spirit like a flag on a casket.

“I was drawn by the music,” God said. “I come to all the recitals. I’m going to take Dorset. I like what she did with Bach’s Fantasy in C Minor.”

“Hush, no talking,” said the boy who had identified Quiz.

“That one too,” God said more softly. “His ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ made me all smarmy.”

“No,” Ladlehaus said.

“I give him six months,” He said confidently.

“No,” Ladlehaus pleaded, “it’s Flanoy. Flanoy’s only a child.”

“Oh, please,” said God, “it’s not that I hate children but that I love music.”

Quiz had stationed himself on the bench where he had taken his low-fat, gluten-free, orthomolecular lunches. This was where he heard the disturbance. He rose from the bench and moved beside Ladlehaus’s grave. There, in plain view of the crowd, he began to stomp on Jay Ladlehaus’s marker.

“Hold it down, hold it down, you!”

“Quiz!” Ladlehaus shouted.

The caretaker blanched. He tried to explain to Mazlish, the principal. “He knows,” he cried, “he knows who I am.” On his knees he pounded with his fists on Ladlehaus’s grave. He grabbed divots of hallowed ground, sanctified earth, and smeared them across his stone. They tried to drag him away. Quiz wrapped his arms about the dead man’s marker. “What are you doing?” he screamed, “I’ve got hypertension. I take low-cal minerals, I’m strictly salt-free. I eat corrective lunch!”

“Get him!” Ladlehaus hissed. “Get him. He’s a composer!”

And God, who knew nothing of their quarrel but owed Ladlehaus a favor, struck Quiz dead.

It would not be so bad, he thought in the momentary shock wave of silence that followed the commotion. It would not be so bad at all. He would exist in nexus to track meets, to games, to practices and graduations, and spend his death like a man in a prompter’s box beneath all the ceremonies of innocence the St. Paul Board of Education could dream up, spending it as he had spent his life, accomplice to all the lives that were not his own, accessory to them, accomplice and accessory as God.

A composer, he thought, I told Him he was a composer. Well, He makes mistakes, Ladlehaus thought fondly. Ladlehaus sighed and hoped for good weather.