I hope your Christmas is a happy one. Happier than ours here, and maybe it will be.
Iris
H
E HAD WRAPPED
it in three layers of tissue paper and shielded it with a pair of sturdy cardboards and inserted it into a padded mailing envelope — yet he knew it could not be arrested or suppressed any more than if he had attempted to encase a flame in a bundle of leaves. It burned on, it burned through whatever sheltered or concealed it. It would set her hands on fire! — those hands that had crazed him, the left stretched far like a cormorant’s wing, the right bunched into a rapacious hammer. Her fingerprints would dissolve and her knuckles turn to blackened dice; she had reaped this punishment, she was an avenging succubus, she had come on him with a suddenness, an ambush, she had meant to unman him. Her punishment was the blindness of her seeing — the blind clarity of her seeing: she would be made to look on those round black notes standing on their stems like black storks shrieking — a cryptogram of blots and filaments decipherable only by sound, and she — she who had mocked him for his impotence — would not, could not, hear! Her ears were blind to those black-blooded droplets raining down, tailed, slashed, some confined to their clef and others freed to race above and beneath it, the chaos of their terrain secreting syllogisms even as they erupted into a turbulence of crisis . . .
It was accomplished, completed, torn out of the Blüthner, torn out of his lungs, out of his testes, out of his ambition, his crushed and desiccated lust. It was vindictive, it was wrathful. And here and there (he felt this as a philosopher feels Truth) it gave birth to Beauty. The
wrath was inscribed in his flesh, but the sublime had befallen him from a power behind the veil. The sublime was to be her punishment: she was locked away from it in the cage of her unknowing. The clef, the code, the voice of the notes, all mute. She was what he had always understood her to be: a musical imbecile.
And from those blind-deaf imbecile hands, the fist and the splay, had come exultation! He saw past spite to glory. The full orchestra, the concert halls (Chicago, New York), the conductor with his white mane — he ran through the luminaries he preferred — and audiences on their feet, washed over by rapture, a blazing rapture grown out of the spill of his brain-womb, its four movements climaxing in a masterstroke, a chorale of high tiny dwarf-falsettos (such miniature singers could surely be recruited) against the dynamitings of the kettledrums. He expected the work to be known as — the world would call it —
Coopersmith’s Symphony in B Minor.
But this commonplace attribution was hardly satisfactory, and anyhow — from the movie business Leo had long ago learned bitter realism — the likelihood was that it would never be performed: the country pullulates with failed symphonies. Never mind, the thing was done, finished. A victory over her disbelief.
But how to get it to her? Where in New York did she live? After all these years certainly not in that old cramped Bronx atelier?
The brother. The mogul as supplicant. The brother had left him his card — not that he’d ever intended to keep it.
— Take this, it’s got all my numbers, and please let me know if you hear of anything that might be a reasonable fit for a kid with a writing flair, my son seems to think he’s good at it, movie scripts for all I know. I’ll make it worth your while if you can come up with something, anything at all . . .
Leo had sent him packing — a boor trading on his sister’s withered connection: a marriage dead, buried, forgotten. Contempt. Disgust. Why should Leo Coopersmith be pursued by a reminder of an ancient whim, a mistaken turn of life? Mistaken and unnecessary — what good had she ever done him? Hounded him with expectations
— true enough, they were his own assumptions and beckoning prospects, which made the case all the more irritating. And that this thick-bellied panting boor had the nerve to push his card on a once-upon-a-time brother-in-law, reduced to a stranger! Standing in his front hall (where now and again he thought he could still sniff the stinking aftermath of the silent actor’s dog), Leo tossed the card over his shoulder, the way superstitious folk spit behind their backs to ward off a curse. He had got rid of those harassments and entreaties, he had shown the fellow the door.
A month later he discovered
Marvin Nachtigall, Aeronautics Design,
a bit crumpled at the corners, on a kitchen counter — Cora, supposing it something of value, had retrieved it. A fortuitous find: to get to the sister he needed the brother.
But it was a girl who answered his ring. A nervous girl in a long skirt, fidgeting with a barrette in her hair. Hair the color of one of the amber panels of the fanlight above her head.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Though I guess it’s why we didn’t hear any singing —”
“Singing?” he said.
“Carolers. They usually come by around this time.”
He looked her over. The nervousness was in the tremor of the nostrils, in the tongue crawling out to moisten the lips. Behind her, in the dim rooms beyond, he glimpsed an unlit tree hung all up and down with trinkets. But no hint of festivity. A darkness in there, a silence.
“Are you collecting for something? Here’s five dollars if you are.” She was ready to shut him out.
“Marvin Nachtigall,” he pronounced. “I think I’ve got the right house? It’s his sister I’m after. Beatrice Nachtigall.”
This stopped her.
“But that’s my aunt. My father’s sister.”
“And it’s your father I’d like to speak to. About his sister, how to reach her —”
“I can tell you that. Why do you want her?”
“I owe her something.” He began again: “I’ve been trying to phone, so if I could see your father —”
“She isn’t called Nachtigall, she has a different name.”
The pinch of surprise. “Then she’s married?”
“Not anymore, that was ages ago.” She stabbed the barrette back into her hair as if the force of it could cow him. What he had taken for nerves was impatience. “What is it you owe her?”
“A present. A musical present.” That he should be so unhesitatingly disclosing the momentous thing on a doorstep, in the street, in the open! The recklessness of anonymity. He felt himself to be an impostor.
He said, “I imagine
you’re
not musical.” How could she be? Her bloodline was against it.
“My mother, maybe a little bit — she once told us that in her teens she had to sing in the choir at church, not that she wanted to. But she’s dead, she died.” The girl’s pale lids flickered. “Almost no one in my family, not really. My aunt Bea’s the only one — she has this enormous grand piano that she treats like it’s some sort of altar —”
“It used to be mine,” he said.
“Yours?” She pondered it.
“I have another one now.” He gave out what — perversely — he knew was a dangerous smile. “Another instrument, another life. I’ve even had other wives.”
“Other wives?” Electrified, she was leaving bewilderment behind; she was catching on.
“She was Beatrice Nachtigall when we met,” he said.
“She calls herself Nightingale.”
“And has the ear of a crow. So if you can let me know where to send —”
“Come in for a minute, I’ll write it down for you.”
“All right.” And then thought better of it. The girl was accommodating enough; it was superfluous to encounter the father. Besides, the tables were turned: who would be the supplicant now, who would be requesting a favor?
“And please don’t mind my dad,” she warned, “if it isn’t business he won’t want to talk anyhow, he’s in a sort of depression. He won’t like you, lately he doesn’t like anyone.”
Petulance. Or was it fury? Boredom, perhaps.
“I’ll wait out here,” he said.
When she came to the door to hand him a square of notepaper, she asked, “What’s this about a crow?”
“Forget the fairy books. In real life,” he instructed, “nightingales sing no better than crows.”
For this she granted him a grin. A glint of her upper teeth: a comely row of small white keys.
“Do you ever go to the movies?” he said.
“Are you asking me out?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m too old for that.”
“In Paris I had a boyfriend who was forty, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Paris?”
“I get around. Or used to.”
“Well, if you happen to see a terrible film called
A Bargain for Betsy
— it’s in all the theaters now — I hereby dedicate the score to you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“For getting me to your aunt. You’ll hear a couple of pretty scherzos.”
“What makes you think I should care?”
“I wrote them.”
“Really? I’d heard,” she whipped out, “you only played the oboe.”
He wanted to slap her then. She’d known who he was for ten minutes or more; she’d been playing with him, dangling a string before a cat. Worse, she’d inherited the paternal insult. But she was a pretty thing, a sort of scherzo herself, skipping from mood to mood; she wasn’t an innocent. She told him that she was, at least temporarily, out of school. She told him that her mother was in an accident on the freeway and that she’d had to desert Phillip in Paris and that she’d
worked in a clinic and that she was exasperated with her father, who was sometimes a bully, even if currently not. And that it was her father who had fancifully christened her in honor of the virgin goddess who lives in the clouds; she let fly this extravagance, though he saw, from the aggressive twisting of her barrette (she was at it again), how she was fabricating it on the spot.
All this on the doorstep under the fanlight.
“In a way,” she said — her grin took on a conspiratorial slant — “you’re practically my uncle.”
This stirred him — it was so like finding the right tempo for some passing trivial tune.
From the bottom of the street the carolers were approaching. “O come, all ye faithful,” they sang.
And for a reason he could not tell, it was on Iris Nachtigall’s doorstep, and out of some half-remembered tale lodged in the memory of a languidly bookish childhood, that the truth of his grand work fell upon Leo Coopersmith. He would call it — the world would call it — by the name of a questionable bird with a biting beak.
I
RIS WAS AGAIN
feeling absurdly tall, a Gulliver among all these little people wriggling in the ten rows in front of her, and in however many rows there were behind her, and in the long blue chain of plush-covered seats to her left and right; their tiny high peepings, a barrage of needle-pricks, were closing in on her. The man who might have been her uncle had never so much as hinted that
A Bargain for Betsy
was a children’s movie, and worse — a cartoon! Betsy turned out to be a plump beaver lady in an abundantly pocketed apron who keeps a jellybean shop in a hollowed-out log alongside a stream and near a dam. The dam is a bulwark against a menacing wood, where a wicked wizard in a leering wolf mask hides his sinister factory in a cobwebby underground vault lined with glass flasks and cruets and urns, each one crammed with brightly colored false jellybeans. But one night, when Betsy is asleep and snoring heartily, he breaks through the beaver-built dam of thick mud and sticks, and invades her shop. His grim purpose is to substitute his own dangerously glittering pellets for Betsy’s wholesome beans, flavored like whipped cream but imbued with the vitamin power of carrots and spinach and cabbage. All the neighborhood children are accustomed to flock to Betsy’s happy shop — mice and squirrels and raccoons, a comical porcupine or two, and a crew of chatty chickens, as well as Betsy’s own brown-furry nieces and nephews excitedly paddling their flat tails. In a charming early scene, accompanied by harp trills, the animal children dance in a ring, with Betsy at its center, as she dips into
the depths of her big pockets to toss out a brilliant shower of healthful jellybeans. And here, as the delighted children scramble to scoop them up, the warbling music grows merrier and sprightlier — butterflies lifting in a powdery mass: Leo Coopersmith’s scherzo!
But it was not for the sake of this dimpling passage of chordal harmonies that Iris had come, for the second time that day, to sit patiently through all the rest — how the wolf-faced wizard slithers into the darkened shop to replace the salubrious contents of Betsy’s jars with his baleful imitations, and how the animal children, innocently ingesting the bad beans, fall into an obedient lockstep stupor and are marched through the ruined dam to toil in the underground factory, and how, coal-eyed and mute, they are made to stir the great steaming vats of faux candies, batch after batch, to lure yet another army of children into serving the wizard’s nasty will. And now the rocking bellowing booming of the double bass, a piercing quiver of fifes, the dense slams of a drum — frightening sounds. All around, the human children are gasping and calling out — some are tearfully bawling — when in bursts brave Betsy with a posse of beaver police . . . and so on and so on, until the rescue is achieved and the pretty little scherzo returns.
At the candy stand in the swarming lobby, Iris noticed a large bin of cellophane-packaged red, green, yellow, blue, and purple jellies labeled
BETSY
’
S BARGAIN BEANS
. She couldn’t remember where in the plot a bargain, or any semblance of a bargain, had occurred: had the film’s writers had their central idea cut? Or is it that the newly freed slave children are inveigled into joining in the urgent task of rebuilding the dam? The rescue has its price, one form of servitude traded for another, and what if they had learned to prefer the silent darker life underground? A trick, Iris thought — the slavish toiling on the dam advertised as a jolly communal endeavor. — But the audience, rushing away, didn’t care, and in less than five minutes the jellybean bin was sold out.
Iris didn’t care either. It was familiar stale Disneyish stuff, the Pied Piper with a stitch or two of the Beanstalk’s ogre laced in — the
talking creatures, the whirling colors, the stilted animation, saccharine! Saccharine and poisonous. The busy travail on the screen was all waste, and nothing to do with . . .
feeling
. . . unless perhaps those apron pockets unwittingly scattering the wizard’s baleful candy drops . . .
what’s carried in a pocket can be deadly.
And suppose it had been a serious film for adults,
High Noon,
say, with Gary Cooper (Iris had seen the posters everywhere — it was one of the summer’s two big American movies in Paris, along with
Whispering Winds
), still the director and the story line and the camera work would have been no more diverting than this feckless cartoon. The uselessness of such movie buff ’s arcana; yet in the past two weeks she had searched out a classic-film club in Santa Monica and a shabby rerun house in Pasadena, and every movie theater that might hurtle her into the swellings and ebbings of Leo Coopersmith’s vibrations. It was the vibrations — the shudderings — she was after. In these musics (there were so many of them) was concealed the private thing she was driven to unravel: what it was in the husband (the husband!) that had enabled Bea to cast him away, to let him go. Wizardlike, he had appeared out of his long, long eclipse expressly to insinuate himself back into Bea’s clean-swept orbit. But Bea was inextricably apart: she could not be retrieved. She had married a husband and let him go. That pivotal letting-go, an undisclosed latch giving way: what was it?