Chamber Music (2 page)

Mrs. Seton would gesture to me to be seated. When I was settled, a ceremony which, in the first years, involved arranging a stack of
Century
magazines under me to raise me to the proper height, she would point to the piece of music I was to begin playing. I was expected to extract it from the pile, open it, smooth it carefully, and wait. Using an ivory corset stay, Mrs. Seton would then point to the place where she wished me to begin. I would play. Her disapproval (very often it was disapproval that followed my efforts) would be indicated by a light tap on the back of my right hand (or the left: whichever was the greater offender) with the long, supple stay, not to hurt but to arrest. My hand would freeze—and lift. Hardly pausing, Mrs. Seton would then raise the stay to the music, pointing with the sharp tip to the mistaken staff. Wrong: one tap at the place, begin here, again. Two taps were hard to bear. They signified despair at my repeated stupidity and begged for my close attention the next time I attempted the passage.

I was puzzled by her unbroken silence. Did it suggest a distrust of the spoken word, a faith in gesture and facial expression as more direct, less open to ambiguity than speech? As I think back, I assure myself that she must have spoken at times, perhaps to greet me when she let me in for my practice hours. Surely she had addressed my mother, but never that I can remember did she say a word to me during a lesson, or to fellow pupils whom I whispered to in a corner of the room at her teas. To each of us she gave thirty-five minutes of her expressive pantomime. We learned to play Schubert and Schumann correctly, or at least as well as her indicative fingers holding the stay, the dismayed bend of her head backward, could suggest to us. We heard no words of praise. She would nod yes two or three times, emphatically. For me that was almost enough.

I put all this down about Mrs. Seton of Dartmouth Street, her unbroken silence, her triple-bolted door, because it was in her sitting room that I first encountered Robert Glencoe Maclaren, to whose life I was for so long to join my own. I remember the occasion, perhaps because all of Mrs. Seton's gatherings were occasions. Twice a year she invited her pupils to visit her, to meet each other and a few of her musical friends. We came in response to tissue-thin, pink-paper invitations sent to us through the mail. Somewhere downstairs, I think, I still have one of them I saved. It measures about six inches square and is folded in half over her minuscule spidery writing. It reads:

There was no provision for refusal. The delicate invitation had the weight and strength of a command. No address was included, on the theory, I'm sure, that only those who knew the way were invited, and the exact day seemed somehow to have been known to us.

Some years later, Robert, who was one of the “friends” she proposed to serve with tea and biscuits, told me that Mrs. Seton had never changed her dwelling. Her elderly parents had brought her as a young child with her upright piano to those rooms. Mr. Seton, of whom I knew nothing, had come to live there upon their marriage, I later learned, and had died soon after. Just before the Great War, my friend Elizabeth Pettigrew told me, Mrs. Seton died in her sitting room. She suffered a stroke when she was alone and lay there, it was conjectured, for three nights and three days unable to rise from the figured rug. Had she
then
used her voice? I wondered. Pupils who came to her door found it locked (three times?), there was no answer to their knocks, and so they went away. She was found by a neighbor who had grown curious about the continued darkness in the upstairs music room and broke a window to find her. Her body lay straightened like the stone effigies on tombs in Westminster Abbey, her eyes opened upon a final silence. Only her hat was misplaced. It lay some distance from her head, having been knocked away by her fall, I believe.

On that earlier afternoon of which I write, I arrived at Mrs. Seton's door at precisely five minutes before four, knowing well that she could indicate her displeasure at late arrival by keeping her heavy, red lids down over her eyes long after it would be expected she would raise them to look at you. I feared that canopied look and rarely came late. She herself opened the door for each guest. On feast days like this she wore her broad straw hat with a velvet band encircling the brim and ending in streamers down her back. She followed me up the stairs into the sitting room, her light step making me feel, in contrast, oafish and leaden.

Mrs. Seton disappeared into another room, presumably to get tea and biscuits for me. There were of course no introductions to the other persons already standing about. The young man standing next to me holding his cup carefully said, “You must be Caroline Newby.”

“Yes.”

“I'm glad to meet you at last. Mrs. Seton speaks often of you. My name is Maclaren. Robert Maclaren.” He laughed a little. “Robert Glencoe Maclaren. My mother calls me Rob.”

“Yes. How do you do?”

That is all I can remember we said to each other that day. I remember thinking: He must be very polite, or perhaps prevaricating. Surely Mrs. Seton had never
spoken
of me to him or to anyone. I watched him as he moved around the room, admiring his fine head, his russet hair, his thick brush of a mustache that sat upon his lip like—like my father's, I thought. Yes, he looked very much as I remember my father looked, even to his ears, which seemed to pinch his head tight, his thin, almost arrogant nose ending so abruptly that it displayed the black dashes of his nostrils. He seemed foreign, somehow, perhaps because of the soft, low collar of his shirt. In those days men in Boston wore tall, stiff collars whose corners turned out neatly over their cravats. Perhaps it was the European look of his suit, which was made of a very heavy cloth.

I watched him put his cup down on the top of Mrs. Seton's glass-doored bookcase in which she kept small busts of Mozart and Meyerbeer. He opened his jacket and then unbuttoned his vest. I remember these actions so well because, watching him, I decided he must be a musician or perhaps an artist: his discomfort in his suit of clothes, his restlessness as he moved around from one side of the room to the other. Finally he sat down on the green settee and talked quietly to the man already comfortably settled there, to whom I was never introduced, only to rise again to greet a pupil standing awkwardly at the side of the piano. I recognized the pupil, a gangly, pimpled boy impelled, I decided, by his ambitious mother to wear the uniform of the prodigy: black silk tie, bowed extravagantly at the base of his collar, and velvet knickers. We had passed each other once or twice at the end of my lesson and the start of his, but we never spoke, Mrs. Seton's reluctance to express the simplest greeting having been communicated to her pupils. I remember comparing the pupil's awkwardness to Robert's grace, to the ease of his laugh, the tone of his low voice: their
suitability
to the room, to the occasion, rising over the unappetizing dry soda biscuits and the blushing boy juggling his tea and his velvet tam.

I was seventeen that year. It must have been 1893, if indeed I am right in thinking I was seventeen. In the late summer Robert and I met again, walking in the Common. He tipped his hat to me and smiled. I felt an unaccustomed rush of pleasure in my face, in my breast. He said he enjoyed our meeting at Mrs. Seton's tea and then he laughed. At the memory of the tea? I wondered, flooded by the charm of his shy smile, as the leash on which he held his huge collie circled my long skirt, pulling it tight to my legs.

“What is his name?” I asked, unable to think of anything more intelligent to say, and untangling myself from the leash.

“Paderewski, I call him. After the pianist I very much admire.”

“Have you been at his performances?”

“Once. In Stuttgart, when I was studying there.”

“Piano?”

“Yes, and composition. I'm returning to Europe in a month or so, this time to Frankfurt, to continue my studies with Carl Heymann and Joachim Raff.”

He smiled a beguiling, gentle, self-deprecating smile as though to indicate the vast gulf between him and the great teachers at the Hoch Conservatory. I could say nothing to this impressive itinerary, I whose musical horizons were limited to the windowless room on Dartmouth Street, to the hatted Mrs. Seton's mimic instruction. I remember staring at him: he seemed a paragon, almost supernatural, a man of the world with talent, free to travel, to study, to leave the little parks and tightly housed streets of Boston for the wide, ancient avenues and noble panoramas of Germany. I yearned for this conversation, full of revelations, to go on.

He took my arm. “May I walk along with you?” he asked, already in step with me, the collie marching slowly ahead of us both, at the end of his taut leash.

“Mr. Maclaren, do you ever think of conducting?”

“I would be pleased if you would call me Robert, or better, Rob.”

“Thank you. I'll call you Robert.”

“Thank you. I'd like to conduct, of course. I'd like to conduct my own work best of all.”

“That seems to me the best one could hope to do, to compose music, and then to direct its performance.”

“To me as well. Control, that is what one would achieve.”

Our conversation on that occasion, as I recall, was formal and exploratory. He asked about my music and I told him, worrying as I did about the disparity between my small pianistic trials and errors and his great plans, that I hoped someday to accompany a singer, or perhaps to play duets, purely for my own enjoyment.

“Of course. Does your family support your ambitions?”

I told him about my dead father, and my mother whose life had closed too early, perhaps even as she sat, pregnant, enfolded in my father's love, at the foot of the great vine at the Centennial Exposition, my mother whose time was now lived in the twilight of that year, a light diminished with each disappointed day. “I'm afraid I am her only interest,” I said. He smiled a concerned smile and shook his head. He said, “I recognize that condition. My own mother must resemble yours. She took me to Paris to study when I was fifteen, leaving my father and brothers behind in Boston. She told Professor Marmontel, when she had me play for him the first time, that she had recognized what she called my genius when I began to have lessons at eight. And so she has, you might say, invested herself in me ever since.”

“Is she still in Europe? Waiting for you?”

“Yes,” he said, “in Frankfurt.”

We walked and talked together for more than an hour. It began to turn to dusk. I reminded him of my waiting mother, he said he would walk my way, we laughed together at Mrs. Seton's idiosyncrasies, he told me she had worn a hat during
his
few early lessons with her. By the time we arrived at my house I thought I knew a great deal about him. I felt he liked me, and I knew, without a single doubt or hesitation, that I loved him.

Three months later we sailed for Germany, leaving Paderewski with friends of Robert's, for the time being. Our engagement had been brief and somewhat perfunctory, only long enough to calm my mother's fears that I was rushing precipitously into the unknown, as she put it, when Robert asked her for permission to marry me before he returned to Germany.

“I will take good care of her,” he said. “Some day I will have more money than I have now, I feel certain, and then Caroline will want for … very little.” I think he started to say “nothing” but corrected himself, feeling no doubt that it was presumptuous to prophesy too much for his talent.

My mother agreed. She was willing to offer her aloneness to my success in marrying this charming and promising musician with an aura of foreign places clinging to his haircut and his unusual suit. She made no demands on us for the customary wedding. Indeed, she seemed too distracted and weary to plan and execute such an event. We were married before a city magistrate who was a friend of Robert's father. His brothers, Logan and Burns, were his best men, Elizabeth Pettigrew accompanied me, and Robert's father was a witness. But the titles were honorary, for the legal ceremony was very short. We took our guests to the Carlton for a late breakfast.

It was curious: my mother did not attend. It seemed to me she did not wish to leave, even for an hour, her abiding conviction that her life was at an end, especially for the predictable optimism of a wedding ceremony, especially for mine. So I took on a new person, and a new name, out of her presence. Not having witnessed the event, she appeared not to believe, or not to wish to believe, in the fact. Her letters to me in Frankfurt were always addressed: “Miss Caroline Newby.” She spoke in her letters as though I were bearing the strangeness of a foreign country alone, warning me of the dangers in the streets at night for an unaccompanied young girl. She sent abroad small packages of Boston tea, and English biscuits in tins, even long leather gloves with buttons at the wrists against what she imagined to be the bitter cold of Germany's black forests.

My letters to her that year, I am sure, spoke of Robert, his hard work and long absences from home while he studied and practiced at the conservatory. I wrote to her about his great delight when he played his first concerto for William Mason, a favorite pupil of the great Franz Liszt, who praised him warmly and predicted a great success for him in the future.