Body & Soul (58 page)

In the course of his studies Claude had learned a great deal about the concerto—from the baroque, through the classical and romantic, right up to Bartók's work before the war. He was aware of the ways in which the form had developed. As well, he knew of the double meaning of the word itself: to join together, to work in concert, but also, from the Latin, to fight, or to contend. The E-flat silver bell represented the solo instrument (piano) engaged in a battle for survival with the more powerful sounds of demolition representing the orchestra. This had come to him, he believed, in a moment of unconscious inspiration and had given rise to the aural hallucination, which he interpreted as a mysterious confirmation of the whole idea.

He pulled out the old blackboard and began sketching various ritornello-sonata structures using symbols, trying to decide on a rough blueprint. From his own library he got the score to Beethoven's fourth piano concerto and analyzed it, paying particular attention to the wild struggle going on in the second movement. He forced himself to leave the studio and pass through the escalating violence of the scene outside to go to the Juilliard library to look at Weber's Conzertstuck, Liszt's two concertos, Copland's 1926 Piano Concerto, and even Schönberg's Piano Concerto of 1942. He drew schemata for each of them, took them home, and thought about them.

When he began to write the first movement he had several false starts. The first statement of the two magic chords was to occur in the second movement, and so he had to work backward to a certain extent, backward and forward at the same time. He was able to sustain the requisite concentration for stretches of two to three hours, at which point he would become slightly manic and begin to write too fast.
When this happened he would break for an hour, eat something, take a hot bath, read the paper, or work on the stock. Anything to stop chasing the music, anything to slow himself down. When he was calm he would go back to work. Very soon the days began to run together. The building continued to shake, the crashing and roaring, the jack-hammers, the air compressors, and the sound of the great trucks went on all day long, but he was too absorbed to notice. Often he would emerge from the studio in the middle of the night and be surprised by the silence.

In bed, he read Bartók scores until his eyes grew heavy and his mind drifted sideways. His dreams were surreal and filled with color. The wreckers woke him every morning.

He had a late supper at a bar and grill on Eighty-sixth Street. Corned beef sliced to order, cabbage, and a boiled potato from the steam table. When he ordered a beer it was green.

"What's this?"

"Saint Paddy's Day. The first one is on the house."

Then he noticed the decorations, green bunting, shamrocks cut from silver paper. It was a rowdy crowd at the bar, people standing two or three deep, knocking back shots, shouting and laughing, spilling beer on the floor. Many of them, he knew, had been drinking all day, having come back from Fifth Avenue and the parade, and would eventually stagger home to the tenements on the long, dark streets between Third and Second, Second and First. These were the diehards, workingmen in their twenties and thirties mostly, going for broke, and there was a dark edge to the general hysteria. He saw two bus drivers, still in uniform, each with a pint of half-and-half, drain their glasses in a race. The loser bought two shots of whiskey.

Alone at his table against the wall, Claude ate his food quickly, eager to be out of the din. He had a second beer and, just for the hell of it, a shot of Jameson. Aware of a comfortable warmth spreading from his belly, he moved carefully to the door.

"Sorry," he said. "Excuse me."

A dark-haired youth slipped on the wet floor and Claude caught his elbow in time to prevent his falling.

"Thanks, mate." He looked about sixteen years old.

Outside, the sidewalks were crowded with revelers, but they thinned out when he turned downtown on Third. After a block the avenue was empty of pedestrians, awash in the eerie brightness of the new streetlights which subtly changed the color of everything. Claude walked along, thinking of Fredericks's question about superstitiousness. He had answered it honestly enough, and he believed himself to be a rational man, but at the same time the magic chords had seemed to arrive from out of this world. The longer he worked on them, the more they seemed a message. It was uncanny how, wherever he was in the concerto, they seemed to contain the clues—sometimes faint and sometimes unmistakable—he needed to proceed. Like the golden pitcher of myth, they never emptied, never ran dry.

As he crossed the avenue at Eighty-fourth Street, he saw two men on the northwest corner with their arms linked, dancing a jig, dark scarves flying, their faces tinged green in the artificial light. They moved with precision, the heels of their heavy boots striking the sidewalk simultaneously, their thick bodies hunched as they danced in a circle, as if around some ancient, peat-fed fire.

As Claude stepped onto the curb they changed their direction and danced over to him. The taller of them reached out a curved arm, attempting to link with Claude and draw him into the dance. Instinctively, Claude pulled back.

"Sure now, you've got to dance," said the taller of the men, lunging to force his arm under Claude's.

"No, really," Claude began, but now the men were on either side of him, one holding his arm and the other reaching up to encircle his neck. They pushed him across the sidewalk toward the aluminum lamppost.

"What, what?" Claude managed to croak through the stranglehold.

"Everybody's got to dance," the tall one said, his whiskey breath hot on Claude's face. "Everybody's got to cooperate, don't you know." Suddenly he shot his elbow into Claude's stomach. Bent over, gasping, Claude felt his arm being wrapped around the lamppost. Another blow to his stomach and he fell to his knees. The shorter man held a foot-long length of pipe in front of Claude's face, showing it to him. The taller man held Claude's arm against the lamppost.

The pain was intense and the world began to get dark. He saw the greenish face and the brown teeth. "Next time, the hand." He blacked out.

Senator Barnes's limousine pulled up to the corner of Eighty-sixth and Park right on time. Claude opened the door with his good arm and got in.

"How long do you have to keep it on?" the old man asked.

"A month or so," Claude said.

The cast started at his left elbow and proceeded to the heel of his hand. There were holes for his fingers.

"Can you move them?"

"Yes." Claude demonstrated. "The doctor at Bellevue said I was lucky. A nondisplaced fracture of the distal radius, otherwise they would have to immobilize everything."

Senator Barnes leaned forward and slid open the glass panel to the driver's compartment. "One Forty-eight West Fifty-seventh, Henry." He slid the panel shut and fell back in his seat as the car moved forward. "Does it hurt?"

"Not now." He touched the cast. "In fact, I played this morning."

"You're kidding."

"A funny feeling with a locked wrist. It reminded me of one of my early teachers, Professor Menti, when I was a kid."

"Well, I'm glad you called me."

"I didn't know what else to do. I hope this doesn't make problems for you."

"It's a piece of cake," the senator said. "I'm glad to help. I felt very bad about what happened up at Larchmont."

"Nobody could have—" Claude began.

"Yes, yes, I know. What's terrible about things like that is the power that gets loose. I mean the destructive power. It's like the Greeks—some god acts on a whim and mortals pay the price. It was too much for her, the poor thing. Although I wish she'd shown a little more salt."

They rode on in silence. When they pulled up in front of the office building the senator glanced at his watch. Henry got out, walked around the front of the car, and opened Claude's door.

"This won't take long, Henry," the senator said, emerging.

"Yes, sir."

Upstairs, in the waiting room of the Luris Corporation, Tom Thorpe lunged up from his chair as Senator Barnes got out of the elevator. "Good afternoon, Senator. Mr. Folsom is —" His smile collapsed as Claude stepped forward. He looked from one face to the other, stunned into silence.

"Take us in," the senator said.

Thorpe moved down the hall, opened a door into a small office, ignored the secretary, tapped lightly on another door, opened it, and
stepped aside. The senator entered, followed by Claude. Thorpe closed the door behind them without coming in.

Folsom sat behind a large desk, a skyline of the East Side revealed through the windows behind him. If he was surprised he did not show it, his dark, wet eyes slow and steady. He got up and extended his hand.

"Senator," he said, "this is an honor."

The senator did not take his hand. "Sit down," he said, as he did so himself. Claude took a chair. Folsom, his face still wooden, obeyed.

"I, ah, I'm wondering what—" Folsom began.

"Conversation is not necessary," the old man said. He glanced again at his watch and then removed two slips of paper from his breast pocket. He slipped the first one across the desk. "Call this number and tell them who you are. They're expecting you."

Folsom took the paper and held it with both hands, studying the single phone number as if it were a code to be deciphered. "Whose number is this?"

"The police commissioner," the senator said without expression. "Mr. Witte."

Folsom paused for a minute, reached for the phone, and dialed. As he waited his eyes went to Claude, flicked down to the cast, and then away. "This is Ed Folsom calling," he said. "Yes, I'll hold." He leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and gave a barely audible sigh. Then his head came forward. "Yes, this is Folsom." As he listened there was a slight compression of his lips. After perhaps thirty seconds he said, "Yes, I understand," and hung up. "Senator," he said, "there must be some kind of mix-up here. I can assure you I know nothing about—"

"Save it, save it." The old man slid the second piece of paper like a playing card. "The mayor is expecting your call."

Folsom licked his lips nervously and bent over the paper. Claude could see what would soon be a bald spot on the crown of his head. Folsom said, "I assure you this isn't—"

"Make the call."

Folsom did so. It took the mayor somewhat longer to say what he had to say than it had the police commissioner. Folsom replaced the receiver with care. His face was pale.

"Okay." The senator stood up and put both hands on Folsom's desk. "One broken window on that building, one chipped brick, one
hot rivet on the roof and you're out of business. One broken fingernail on this young man and you're in jail. You had better pray for his health." He pushed himself up and turned away. Claude followed him out.

Halfway down the elevator the old man said, "I wonder where he got the name Luris? He owns the corporation—sixty percent of the stock, in any case. Big contributor to the Democratic Party." He gave a sudden, hearty belly laugh. "Lot of good it did him."

The cast on his left arm made a convenient paperweight as he scribbled away at the score, most often in the studio but sometimes upstairs at the desk in front of the window. As he got deeper into the piece he seemed to be able to concentrate longer, taking fewer and shorter breaks as the weeks went on. The fundamental line emerged, a kind of weaving in and out between the piano and orchestra, complementing one another and then opposing one another, which created a pattern linking all three movements. Writing the piano solos, he was guided by the fragile, spooky clarity of the bell. Certain sections were technically complex, but only as a development of fairly simple themes. With the orchestra, however, he went for dense textures, a lot of inner movement, tension, and occasionally violence. The two magic chords stood once in the second movement and once in the recapitulating third movement, like two mighty pylons upon which the entire structure was hung.

One day as he was coming back with a bag of groceries, his head full of music, one of the Luris foremen ran up the tunnel to catch him at the door.

"The glass is coming tomorrow," he said. "Is that okay? We can do it another day if you want."

"What glass? What are you talking about?"

"The windows." He gestured to the plywood sheets. "Didn't they tell you? Luris is giving you new display windows. Real thick plate. A lot better than the old ones."

"Are they really," Claude said. "Well, that's a nice gesture. Tomorrow will be fine."

"Okay. Right."

"I hope it won't be too messy. I've cleaned up I don't know how many times."

"Don't worry. We'll be using our best men. Old-timers, real craftsmen."

Toward the end he found himself writing so quickly it almost scared him. When all three movements were complete, he went back and worked bar by bar from the beginning, adding detail, editing, altering a bit of melody or the voicing of a chord. He did this time after time, a dozen or more times.

"Hey, don't you ever answer the phone?" It was Otto Levits. "I've been calling for days."

"I should get an extension down in the studio. I've been working."

"That's good, because I've got an engagement. The New Rochelle Friends of Music. You can do the Schubert program you did at Columbia. They specifically asked for it, so this is easy and it's good money."

"Otto, I can't."

"No, no, no," he exploded. "I didn't hear that! You never said that!"

"I've got a broken arm."

"This is a lie. Stay where you are, I'm getting a cab. I'm practically there already."

Half an hour later he came through the door. "What's going on around here? They're tearing down the whole block."

"Not quite. Not this building." Claude held up his cast. "That's how I got this."

"The cast is a ruse," Otto said. "I know all these neurotic tricks. I've been dealing with crazy artists my whole life."

"Sit," Claude said. "I'll get some coffee from across the street and tell you the whole story. You want a donut?"