A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief
Inspired by The Passion According to St. John by Johann Sebastian Bachby Daniel Stern
SMU PRESS
Kraft was lost, there was no getting around it. For a half hour he’d gone from highways with exotic names—The Joe Halliburton Memorial Turnpike—to equally incomprehensible numbers, I-45, which turned into a local road numbered 635. Now instead of missed turnoffs and U-turns it was a matter of dirt roads loitering past rickety wooden shacks, chickens and other fowl, dogs dozing in front of a 7-11. The wrong side of whatever tracks his new home might boast.
He might have gotten himself lost because of the unfamiliarity of a Texas roadscape to a man whose eyes were entirely accustomed to cityscapes. His first wife, Yvette, had called him an unregenerate New Yorker. To which he replied, “Being a New Yorker is not a crime, you can’t be unregenerate.” “Maybe not,” she said, “but it’s a handicap. You didn’t learn to drive till the age of thirty-three and you still can’t read a map worth shit.” Yvette had owned a tough mouth, in contrast to Maureen.
Still, it was gentle, soft-spoken Maureen who had landed him in his present predicament, lost on a highway, lost in Texas, a little lost in his own life. Maureen’s skill with numbers had gotten her a job offer from a Texas bank so tasty it could not be turned down. Not by Maureen and thus not by Kraft, who wanted only to continue adjunct teaching two days a week at Pace University; to keep conducting the Bronx Community Orchestra—small potatoes but his own dish—while dreaming of doing the Mahler Eighth in Lincoln Center.
Maureen was only months past the awfulness of nursing a twin sister through a two-year soul-destroying illness when he’d met her. She was ripe for a change of heart, and a change of scene didn’t seem too unattractive. Change, any change, promised some relief from remembered pain—though she kept it quiet, private. It was not a distancing that he minded. He and his first wife Yvette had been entwined in each other’s souls, and when that kind of intimacy went bad it went very bad.
So change there would be; a life with more cash even sacrificing New York dash. And if there was to be a child, perhaps two, then the move to Texas seemed inevitable. Kraft was reconciled. Even in mid-April with the heat raging, even with the car’s air-conditioning working on its own intermittent impulse, an occasional blast of cold air, then a downward spiral: cold, cool, warm. He’d pressed every button in sight but nothing changed.
He slipped a cassette into the rental car’s tape deck. Music would ease the pain of a sweaty search for a gas station where he might get right-left instructions to get him back in the right direction. Right-left was what people who couldn’t read maps used instead of cartography. Turn right at Bushwick, turn left at Gibson Court, and sooner or later you arrived at what he and Maureen were now to call home.
The sonority of the music surprised him, terrific bass, the treble lines never breaking or turning shrill, even under the stress of the mighty chorus of the Bach St. John Passion. The air-conditioning unit might be fragile but just listen to these woofers and tweeters. Did they have musicians consulting on the sound control at General Motors, standing around the factory wearing hard hats, examining blueprints the way engineers did in TV commercials? Somebody had arranged for a magnificent, blood-trembling opening chorus to fill the small cabin with the three-hundred-year-old pain and passion. Kraft found it thrilling. If he had to start living in the boredom of cars and white lines instead of subways, buses and the left-right of legs, and sweating out being lost, then the radio was an important anodyne.
Healing was how it felt. Kraft was submerged in the ecstatic curve of the chorus. Herr unser Herrscher. Lord our sovereign… . Echoes of poor Koerschner, lively, noisy Koerschner, and his greeting, “Well, Herr Kraft. Guten tag.” Koerschner, step-by-step diminishing into an X-ray of his old substantial self, needing and accepting only the consolations of music and visits from grandchildren, the pleasures of his vast collections of recordings of birdsongs, all catalogued, all with unpronounceable names. When the hospital rabbi came around he would inveigle the poor man into a discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas and the logical proofs of the existence of God. Rabbi-baiting was one of Koerschner’s old agnostic sports.
The death of your best friend was not the smoothest way to ease you out of your New York life, but that was the way it had gone. Kraft took in the numbers on the speedometer and clamped down on the brake. He’d had two speeding violations in the last six months. “Put it down to stress,” Maureen said, to soften his anxiety, “moving, changing jobs.”
“Tell that to the judge,” Kraft said. A suspended driver’s license in New York would have been an inconvenience; in Texas it was unimaginable, like losing a leg or an arm.
Restless, Kraft did some fast-forward tape-surfing. Verherrlicht worden bist. “You will be glorified,” the chorus reminded Kraft, with a thrilling blast, and he pulled into a Shell station which offered a free car wash with every fill-up. The attendant was a red-haired local kid who pulled out a map and had to be convinced to put it away and just explain in surface terms—turn left here, right there.
Set straight, Kraft was eager to get back and talk to Maureen. It was almost five o’clock. His first meeting with the Floyd Robbins High School of Performing Arts had gone well. Everyone seemed thrilled to have the New York musician teaching their kids, conducting their orchestra. Even Basford, the cool “headmaster”—fancy term for a high school principal, probably to impress the parents. But Basford was pretty sophisticated. He and Kraft had chatted about Haydn’s attitude towards Beethoven’s counterpoint, things like that. Basford had a Ph.D. in musicology, a step up the ladder from Kraft; nevertheless Kraft took the lead in programming conversations.
They’d settled on the first concert. Familiar, safe sounds. This was a small city, conservative. He’d been reminded of this fact a number of times by one of the board members, an intense, serious man, white hair, half-glasses, familiar with Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven and the Haydn London Symphonies. He had one of those nonNew York names Kraft was getting used to, Jordan Baines, a retired oil-zillionaire with a passion for music. He’d graduated NYU Law School and he and his wife visited New York once a year, without fail. They liked Jewish food, he told Kraft, who was somewhat dazed at receiving this information.
It had been quick and easy to arrive at a program for the kickoff concert: a Berlioz overture, the Benvenuto Cellini, then the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, with the Haydn 102nd Symphony as the centerpiece. All were Kraft’s choices, a happy school board and headmaster along for the ride. Tonight he and Maureen would celebrate, exchange battle stories from the new Texas wars, drink too much wine, go to bed early or at least swiftly.
Back on the antiseptic sweep of the Interstate highway the Bach swept him along, too. Kraft knew the St. John score well, had always wanted to conduct it, but there was never an opportunity, never any money for such a large chorus, for extra rehearsals. There came the exquisite aria for alto and two oboes, a moving mixture of middle-range and high-range sounds.
“What ze lay person cannot bear to believe,” Koerschner had said in his slightly comic-opera mittel-Europe accent, as he lay in a confusion of hospital equipment, “is zat Bach was as concerned with solving ze technical problem of balancing an alto sound with ze soprano range of ze two oboes as much as wiz expressing ze suffering of Christ on ze cross. Zis is too professional. Zis they cannot accept.” By this time Koerschner was having difficulty catching his breath at the end of so long a statement. Finally Kraft was reduced to writing notes to his friend in hopes that Koerschner would strain himself less by writing back, saving breath.
It was the mournful sifting of oboes and a rich and dark alto voice in the very aria they’d discussed that reminded Kraft of the last exchange of letters. Following the inexorable law that the living and healthy will bring their troubles to the sick and dying, he had written a letter which began as an apology for leaving New York for Texas when his friend, his teacher and mentor, was in trouble. But the letter quickly evolved into a lament for the slackness of Kraft’s own life, the lack of forward movement, Leonard Bernstein, Toscanini in his soul and a high school conductor in his life.
Koerschner had written back (it was his last note): I will miss you. I got to know you too late, this is painful. But I have done everything too late. I came to America too late, I started writing music too late. The only thing I’m doing too early is my current activity of departure. There are birdsongs in Texas where you go which I will now never hear, so beautiful, so surprising in their repetition. Birdsong is one of the luckiest gifts. It is painful to have to leave this extraordinary earth with its lucky gift of music, this extraordinary earth where, at one time or another, every kind of happiness seems possible.
Then addressing Kraft’s personal anxiety: Please remember: You are a good man, gifted and quick on the draw; your talent will be what you make of it, and wherever you use it. But in the meantime enjoy your life because it respects you.
That last line haunted Kraft with its gnomic last phrase. How did a life respect its owner? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? The aria ended and a mournful chorale filled the car. The round sounds of the Bach were a perfect accompaniment to his Koerschner memories; was it Bach’s musical passion or his love of the Passion’s Jesus that made it feel so healing, or maybe the two couldn’t be split in spite of oboes and altos and crucifixions. Strange that it should help him say a sweaty good-bye to his friend in a Hertz rental car on an alien Interstate 45.
In the rear mirror Kraft became gradually aware of a whirling rainbow on top of the car behind him. Oh, shit, he thought, afraid to look at the speedometer. Ninety, he’d been going ninety. He braked gradually and pulled over to the shoulder, dizzy, afraid.
He was already opening the glove compartment, fiddling for the registration and insurance stuff when he saw the trooper looming in his side mirror, very tall, very wide; it was like seeing a house moving towards you, about to crush you. Behind the shiny black belt and boots, the holster and protruding brown gun butt, Kraft saw one edge of the police car front bumper—a sticker read: i found jesus. shouldn’t you be looking?
The trooper bent over and rapped on the window. In his panic Kraft had forgotten to roll it down. He hit the button but he had also forgotten to turn off the tape deck and now, through the downward slide of the window, a chorus blasted out. In return, the heat blasted in, taking Kraft’s breath away.
The policeman squinted at Kraft over this beautiful racket. He seemed bewildered to be greeted by the volume of the music and the foreign words. For an instant Kraft sensed he might have the advantage, might escape this disaster, license intact, mobile, he and Maureen safe, happy in their new, two-car world. Before the trooper could say a word Kraft took his life in his hands, in his mouth and voice. He had to almost shout to be heard over the music.
“Listen, officer, I know I was going over the speed limit … but I was absolutely carried away, wiped out by the music and I had no idea what the numbers on the speedometer said … not just the music but the words, the meaning … I mean it’s almost Easter time and I was so moved, I lost myself… . Listen …” Kraft chanted along with the thundering chorus—he’d done this so many times in the classroom—
Christus der selig macht,
Kein Bos’s hat begangen,
Der ward fur uns in der Nacht …
The policeman owned a beefy face, red-cheeked with puffy pink lips, now all frozen in a stare of astonishment. Finally he spoke. “What’s that language? Some kind of Jewish?”
“It’s German. It means …” To stop shouting Kraft turned the volume down. “It means: Christ who brings us salvation, himself innocent of any sin, was seized in the night like a thief …” Afraid to leave the word thief hanging in the air, Kraft stumbled forward, pulling from some part of his memory more words he needed. “He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” That felt a lot better. “The pain and beauty of it broke me up and I lost control of who I was, where I was, of what I was doing.” Thinking, well it’s a little true, Koerschner and music and suffering and Christ had gotten all mixed up in the flow of music and memory.
The trooper pushed his Texas-style hat back from his damp forehead. He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Would you get out of the car please, sir.”
Oh my God, Kraft thought, sweat blurring his eyes. He clicked a swift slideshow in his mind: being bent over the car, being searched for weapons, for drugs. He closed the door quietly. His head came about to the trooper’s shoulders. The air trembled with heat. Without warning the policeman grabbed him and hugged him to his chest. No man had held him that close since his grandfather. Dizzy with astonishment, with fear, Kraft registered the smell of sweat and something minty, chewing gum, mouthwash, something.
“You,” the trooper said into his ear. “You’re my brother.”
“What?”
“You’re my brother—my brother in Jesus.”
Thank God, Kraft thought. No ticket, no suspended license. The trooper stepped back and stared at Kraft. A smile creased his mouth. “Would you get back in the car please, sir?”
Kraft focused his eyes on a pin on the man’s chest. It read Art Birdwell. Giddy with anxiety he thought, for one stupid second, together we make Art and Kraft—brothers, indeed. He was afraid to look back. He imagined Art Birdwell’s bulk sliding into the patrol car, his mouth moving, radioing something to somebody—maybe checking to see if his newfound brother in Jesus had a criminal record, was driving a stolen car.
In a few minutes he was back. He looked triumphant. “May I see your driver’s license and your proof of insurance, sir.” He pronounced it insurance with the accent on the first syllable. Kraft’s father, Louis, had been an insurance broker for thirty-five years, always with the accent on the second syllable. His son Ben took this as proof that he was now in a foreign country.
Kraft scrambled to hand the documents over. Then the wait, staring straight ahead, his shirt sticking to his back, pitying, relieved drivers whizzing by on the highway. He turned the tape volume up and Bach sang again. Now it was about plaiting a crown of thorns and calling to Jesus, in mockery, Hail, King of the Jews.
A different kind of panic at what he might have started grew in Kraft and he turned the music off, as if that might let him start over again. But when Trooper Birdwell reappeared at his window his heart sank. The man wore a grin as wide as his chest. He stuck a beefy hand through the window and handed back Kraft’s license and the insurance card.
“Well, Brother Kraft,” he said. “You were going twenty-five miles over the speed limit. But if y’all would come down to the station and just tell some of our people there what you told me—I mean about the amazing gift of light that came to you through the music about Our Lord—well, I think you can count on a touch more mercy than justice from our fair city. The boys’r all real eager to hear your story.”
Kraft did not move.
Birdwell stared down at him with the bluest eyes Kraft had ever seen.
“Y’all will be good enough to share your experience with the rest of us, ain’t that right?”
Kraft did not speak. A life of glibness, of quick improvising, was suddenly gone.
“Mr. Kraft”—the question of brotherhood seemed to be suspended for the moment—”This is ya third moving violation …”
Kraft came alive. “It’s not that, officer,” he said. “It’s just very personal. I mean feelings like that …”
“Ah understand. But if more people shared the coming of the light, it could be a different world down here.”
Kraft folded. “Sure, I’ll be happy to tell about it. How do I get—”
The door opened and Trooper Birdwell said, “Just scoot over and I’ll get us down to the station real quick.”
Kraft had said almost nothing since singing his first terrified half-lie, the swift riff which had rolled off his tongue to save his ass. It was an old habit, a childhood style of survival—he was as quick with words as with notes, a good sight reader and a good liar when threatened: a bad report card, a lost expensive pair of gloves, a missed piano lesson. But the weirdness of the situation he’d talked himself into had temporarily silenced him. With his car about to be invaded he found a voice again.
“What about your car?” he jerked his head backwards.
“Not a problem. Brother Cartwright will lead us back to the station.”
Kraft twisted around. There at the wheel was Brother Cartwright, a skinny, smiling trooper, sans hat, waving a greeting; a second witness to his perjury. Kraft scooted over to the passenger side, endangering his testicles since there was a gear shift on the floor to be negotiated; but Trooper Birdwell was looming and Kraft scuttled.
The siren behind him began its furious whine and the whirling light resumed. Startled, Kraft jumped and hit his head. Trooper Birdwell turned the key and said, “Seat belt, sir. State law.” Breathing the new aroma of sweat and mint that filled the car, Kraft buckled his seat belt. It was just as well because the law apparently knew no speed limits in Texas. The difference between an Interstate highway and a roller coaster had apparently not been revealed to Trooper Art Birdwell or to Brother Cartwright, who was clearing their way, whirling rainbow, moaning siren and all.
“Let’s get us some air,” Birdwell said. He hit a couple of buttons and a blast of life-giving cool air rolled over Kraft’s soaking face and chest. While he huddled in his passenger seat, trying to control his urge to throw up, Art Birdwell spoke revelations.
“What happened to y’all back there, goin’ outta control blinded by the light …” Kraft could see the experience was turning mythical in Art Birdwell’s hands; there was no knowing how far it might go. “… It’s like what happened to me right after little Billy was squashed like a bug right in front of our house. A drunken sumbitch drivin’ an eighteen-wheeler took my Billy boy and Sally and I were in the darkness that knows no end for I don’t know how long.” He squinted a look of misery at Kraft. “But the mystery was just at the beginning. We found His mercy and we’ve been wrapped in His arms ever since. We know the joy of the Lamb.” Tears wet the leathery face and Kraft felt sick at his stomach for reasons that had nothing to do with hairpin turns or jamming brakes. What kind of a disgusting fraud had he started, with a man whose suffering was real and whose Jesus was equally real?
Talking and weeping in an odd singsong, Art Birdwell said, “I forgave that drunken sumbitch the way He would have, the way you would have, Brother Kraft.”
I would have killed the bastard, Kraft thought. He would have given anything to go back to the moment on the highway, hand over his insurance card and registration, take his ticket, lose his license, confess to an angry Maureen that he was now helpless, would have to be driven everywhere like a child, that their new beginning had been blighted by an absent-minded love of Bach on Interstate 45. But he had nothing to offer in exchange for such a miracle.
Daniel Stern
* * *
Somebody at the 12th Precinct seemed to have forgotten where the buttons for air-conditioning were. The tall, dirty windows were tightly shut and there was a sort of hum in the air, but the temperature was tropical. A serious sense of unreality walked with Kraft through the doors—maybe it was the slow-revolving ceiling fans, or the two dogs, a black Lab sleeping on folded paws, the other a slender, elegant Doberman, growling softly, as if talking to himself; maybe it was the way Brother Cartwright introduced him to the assembled group of troopers as an Easter Lamb who’d been saved on Interstate 45 by St. John, or finding himself blinded by the light of a camera flash—there was a newspaperman covering the precinct. He actually wore a white suit and the sense of unreality Kraft was caught in resolved itself into late-night memories of thirties movies with Texas Ranger hats (they seemed not to have changed in style since those movies were made), pistols protruding from hip and shoulder holsters, sweating reporters in white suits, and slowly-turning ceiling fans.
Art Birdwell must have been pushed to preacherlike eloquence on his car radio because a welcoming committee was waiting. Kraft was asked to sing the same song he’d sung in a sudden frenzy with the flashing lights in the rearview mirror urging him on. Only now the song had new words; the rapture at hearing the pain of the Passion couldn’t be recaptured precisely. Being encircled by eager, interested faces, by a reporter scribbling, it became an aria of Easter and its mysteries.
He had no idea when Easter was this year, only that it came shortly before Passover because his sister had invited him and Maureen for the Seder in Cambridge and Maureen’s mother had invited them for Easter Sunday dinner in Chicago, neither being possible because of Maureen’s new job, Kraft’s teaching and rehearsal schedule and the high cost of the plane tickets. But it didn’t matter. Easter became an image, a way of escape, a shortcut to get himself out of this mess, back for dinner with Maureen, this awful, sweating day behind him, ready to start again, clean, all of it forgotten, not least of all Trooper Birdwell’s angry tears at the sumbitch who had crushed his Billy Boy like a bug.
Three-quarters of an hour later, driving back, Kraft heard it on the radio. Every bit of it, as if it were real news—a New York driver seeing the light on the Interstate, hearing the Good News for the first time in his life. They even gave his full name, Mr. Benjamin Kraft, and his job at the Floyd Robbins High School of Performing Arts. He switched stations but there it was on several of the others. It was drive time and surely some of the school board would have heard it. Maureen would probably have heard, too. Like Kraft, she could not stand the boredom of driving without the radio or the tape deck on. What kind of town was this where a foolish traffic incident could become news! The Bible Belt, everyone knew the expression. Kraft had always assumed it was in the South, but he had only a vague idea of where. Geography had never been his strong point.
She was sitting in the tiny kitchen, at the fold-down breakfast table, tapping at her laptop. She looked up, startled; a sheen of hair veiled her eyes. Maureen’s red hair was a great feature; long and blindingly red, frequently in her eyes. He leaned over her and kissed her mouth. If she knew what had happened, Kraft was sure she would wait for him to say something. There was something hidden, something once removed, about Maureen’s emotional responses. He would tease her about what he called her buried life and she would laugh him off, saying the whole world is not Hungarian, not Jewish, not so expressive at all times.
“How’s the job? They say the second week’s the worst. The first week is a daze. By the second the reality takes over.”
“I think Small loves me. That’s what I call reality.” Small was the chief financial officer who had recruited her. “I’m already doing the numbers on a leveraged buyout. From down here. Hard to believe.”
He sank into a chair. “This air-conditioning is wonderful. I couldn’t get it to work right in the car.”
“A lot of odd things seemed to happen in that car.”
“You heard.”
“It was all over the radio.”
“It’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”
“I almost drove onto the shoulder when I heard your name—what happened? I mean it’s so far from you …”
He told her the truth, that he had surprised the hell out of himself by being desperate to save his driver’s license, by reaching for any story that offered salvation.
“It was the bumper sticker that triggered it. If it had read guns don’t kill people, people kill people, maybe I would have spun out a story about how I was new in town and daydreaming about needing a gun to protect my family, I don’t know. Also the air-conditioning wasn’t working. The car was like a steam bath. You don’t make rational decisions at a moment like that.”
He opened the refrigerator and scanned the interior, suddenly starved.
“Well,” Maureen said. “It was a brilliant idea. It got you off the hook.”
He turned around, pained, anxious for her to understand.
“It was a disgusting idea. I mean, not if somebody had really felt that way, but to use it for a trick—” And he told her of Trooper Birdwell’s little boy and his talking about being wrapped in His mercy and the joy of the Lamb while weeping and driving like a witch on a broomstick. “I went from feeling triumphant to feeling like shit in about two seconds.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You didn’t mean to humiliate the man. And he doesn’t know.” She gazed at him in a steady way that made Kraft uncomfortable.
“That’s just it,” he says. “Nobody knows except us. The whole town’s going to have an idea about me that I don’t know how to handle.”
“You’d better close the refrigerator door,” Maureen said. “I’ve got a fresh salmon in there for tonight.”
Kraft remembered. “And I’ve got a bottle of wine in the car. How’d you like a nice boiled Chardonnay for dinner?” He raced out to the car. By the time they ate, the Chardonnay was cold and the salmon was indeed fresh and tasty. Kraft was feeling better about life with his new wife in this new ticky-tacky home, in this new city. They had rented sight unseen because of the rush to get Maureen started on her new job and because it was easier to take a blind chance than to spend the air fare for a reconnaissance visit. They talked of plans for a new house; the next one would be larger—code word for a child or two or three.
Kraft was feeling loosened up. He’d had more wine than usual, enough to fuel a difficult question to Maureen.
“You were looking at me, before, in a different way,” he said. “What were you thinking?”
“When?”
“Before.”
Right after Maureen had reminded him that nobody, not Birdwell, not anybody, knew about the day’s religious fakery except them, she had leveled that intense, steady gaze at him. Kraft was certain they both remembered the moment but Maureen did not seem to want to get into it. He dropped it and pulled her up from her chair and her sorbet and cookies thinking bed might be nicer than analyzing difficult gazes.
They left the dishes, the pans, everything—even though Maureen’s cardinal rule was that after fish you washed it all right away or you had fish smells forever. But it was an inauguration, the first time they’d made love in their new place, city, state, life. It had been too hectic and exhausting the first ten days and this evening they made languorous love, made love instead of explaining gazes, instead of feeling remorse. It was fine and afterwards he fell asleep, his head on her stomach, swathed in Maureen’s long red hair, breathing the sweet smell of her shampoo.
Kraft woke, alone in the bed, groggy and feeling wrong about something. Not something large, he knew at once; something small. As he swam from sleep to the morning he’d been hearing a phrase of music, but it was the words that were the matter, not the melody. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He’d thrown that at Trooper Birdwell as an extra weapon.
He should have known he was making a hodgepodge of references. It wasn’t even Bach. It was from the Messiah. He heard in his mind’s ear the old Marian Anderson recording Koerschner had once given him, a birthday present, heard again the way she bent the notes, infusing melodic curve with sonorous sympathy. He was despis-ed, rejected. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. That last phrase had always struck him as an amazing line of poetry: acquainted with grief. Not submerged by grief, not destroyed by grief; acquainted. The casualness of the word gave the pain its power.
This settled, he turned to find Maureen. She often slipped out of bed before him and woke him for breakfast. This morning the air was empty of the usual coffee and toast smells. Kraft swung out of bed but the ringing of the phone put his search on hold.
It was Jordan Baines, formerly of oil and now of Haydn, Beethoven and Jewish cooking. Baines’s phone had been ringing off the hook— members of the school board. Everybody was thrilled.
“Sorry to call so early, Ben.”
“No, no …”
“But there’s so much fuss goin’ on. Now please understand—wouldn’t want to trespass on a man’s private feelings but just want you to know that the board would be most happy if you’d switch the first program. Do the St. John Passion. Whole town’ll come out for that, now. We could fill the basketball court ‘stead of the school concert hall.”
Kraft stalled, he mentioned the extra rehearsal time, the technical demands of the Passion.
“The concert date’s awful close to Easter Sunday. Be sort of perfect,” Jordan Baines said. He held a pause, then: “I think most everybody was truly moved by the things you said. Take a look at this morning’s paper. Doesn’t happen every day, a revelation like yours, speedin’ down the highway. If Saint Paul’d been drivin’ a car on the road to Damascus … Hah … Anyways, you think about it, Ben. Let me know.”
Kraft folded his head in his hands but the night’s sweet shampoo smell of Maureen’s hair was so strong that it conquered even his confusion at what he’d started. He found her in the walk-in closet downstairs, intensely searching through some of their still unpacked luggage. She was wearing her nightgown but her face, when she turned it up at his approach, was shadowed under the eyes, dark creases at the corners of her mouth. She looked awful.
“Are you okay?” he said, feeling it a dumb but necessary question.
She upended a small carrying case, a fountain of sunglasses, handkerchiefs and old ballpoint pens.
“I couldn’t sleep much,” she said.
“Why?”
She scavenged a hard-sided piece of luggage, tops and bottoms of pajamas, shoes in velvet drawstring bags. “Damn.” She looked over her shoulder at Kraft. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What you said, what I heard on the radio about Christ who brings us salvation, innocent himself …”
“But that was just Bach …”
“And most of all, he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” She pulled down a large case and almost beaned herself and Kraft with it. When she tried to open it, it stuck. “Give me a hand, Ben, please.”
He remembered the combination, it was her birthdate, and it came open. “What are you looking for? What’s so important? God, what time did you get up? Did you have breakfast?”
“I’m looking for a hat. I got up at three.”
“Three o’clock in the Ayem? Why did that stuff yesterday upset you so much? I don’t get it, Maureen. I had a crazy day—but I slept.”
She turned a wan smile. “You always sleep,” she said. “You’re an artist of sleep.”
He rubbed his eyes. “If Jordan Baines hadn’t called I’d still be sacked out.”
He told her about Baines and the suggested program change.
“Do you want to do it?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. These kids are pretty good but they’re not up to the St. John. And it would be like—an endorsement of the whole thing. You don’t capitalize on something that was supposed to be a joke—a kind of ugly joke but still a joke.” He took a beat. “But I have to admit, I get a charge out of the idea of conducting those sublime choruses.”
“Very grand.” She smiled.
“Grandiose,” he said.
She gave him a kind of echo of the gaze that had troubled him last night over the Chardonnay.
“And that’s not for you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Kraft said. “I think Papa Haydn’s my man. Listen, I’m worried about you up since three. And I’ve never seen you wear a hat.”
“You’ve only known me for two years or so. You have to expect a few surprises. And never mind Papa Haydn. You’re my man. Not to worry.” She kissed him quickly and went back to her search.
Just two years! He’d met her a few months after the death of her twin sister. Maureen had sweated through four years of her sister’s failing heart; had taken the years before turning twenty and given them to seeing her out, finishing college two years late. It was not something she could talk about. The friend who introduced them had told Kraft or he never would have known about it. It may have been the reason he’d felt in her, practically at their first date, large silences, secret recesses not even their quick intimacy could touch.
Kraft was no stranger to loss, his mother dead at forty-five of cancer and his father selling insurance North, East, South, West so that a grudging Aunt Rose became mother and father. His ambition, too, was woven with a sense of loss: a good pianist but not quite concert level, a talented conductor but finally destined for high school orchestras instead of Rome, Paris, London. “Zere are twenty-five major conductors in ze whole musical world,” Koerschner’s not-quite-consoling words. “Better to make peace and do good work wherever you are.” And there was his first marriage—Yvette. He’d hidden hopes there, too, and they’d been lost.
“Aha!” Maureen turned to him wearing a foolish-looking beige hat. “What do you think?”
“You look like a flapper.”
“It was called a cloche when my mother bought it for me.”
Apprehensive, Kraft said, “I don’t think it looks so great on you.”
“Don’t forget, I won’t be wearing it with a nightgown in church. A dress, shoes, gloves, a hat. You know. I need a mirror.” She vanished and returned before Kraft could organize his reactions to what she’d said. Maureen didn’t go to church. They’d agreed their childhood religions meant little to them. Their children could pick their own when the time came. It had all been talked through.
“This’ll do,” she said. “Come on, I’ll make us some breakfast.”
She set out the orange juice, the plates, made French toast and coffee, dressed in slippers, her nightgown and the beige cloche hat. Kraft waited for a mouthful of French toast and then mumbled, “You’re going to church, today?”
“I think so,” she said.
“But I thought that was all—done with.”
“I thought so, too. Then after you fell asleep I couldn’t get what you said, what you did, out of my head. I kept wondering why you would use that particular strategy on the unsuspecting police. Maybe you felt more than you knew, yourself.”
“Oh, my God, Maureen.”
She ignored how flustered the conversation was making him. “I’m not being literal,” she said, pouring coffee for both of them with a steady hand. “I don’t think you found Christ in spite of yourself, or any of that, I mean something more subtle—the feelings behind the capture of Jesus, his sacrifice—I’ve heard the St. John Passion. Those feelings are all in there.”
“You’re mixing up the words and the music. Any feelings I had came from the music. Maureen, darling Maureen, this is your childhood, not anything to do with me. I was just fighting a panic attack at the idea of a third violation and I saw—”
“I know,” she said. “You saw the bumper sticker. Anyway, I found myself, in the middle of the night, with a ferocious desire to set foot in church again. To hear the words of the Mass. I looked up the Yellow Pages and found a Catholic church here in Baptist land.” She stood up and started to push her flood of red hair under the hat, as if she were off to church that moment, in slippers and nightgown.
“Be a good soul and clean up the breakfast mess while I get dressed. It’s going to be a rush and they gave me directions but I have to allow time to get lost.”
She started off but Kraft caught up to her and turned her around. When she turned, her hair twirled and Kraft caught a whiff of perfume, shampoo, soap, he had no idea. He just felt at that moment how glad he was to have found her. There was a tightness in his chest that was either angina or love.
“Maureen, why are you doing this?” he said, helpless.
Maureen paused and repeated the gaze that had troubled him the night before. She slowed down the pace of her talk as if to finally meet Kraft halfway in his anxiety.
“At three-thirty in the morning I couldn’t stop thinking about my sister Peg and all she went through and how hard it is to say good-bye and how unfair because she was the one with all the pizzazz, all the zip, and she was taken.”
Kraft was afraid she might start to cry. He didn’t know what to say, was afraid he might never know what to say to meet such feelings.
Maureen took off the silly hat and poked at it, trying to give it some shape again and she said, “I haven’t had any place to put my grieving, Ben.”
“Into life—this life, ours …”
“It doesn’t always work too well.”
He would like to have held her, then, but it didn’t seem fair to the depth of her unhappiness; embraces could be as glib as quick, improvised replies. Instead he said, “You kept it under wraps so much. I didn’t know how you really felt, what you’d been through till maybe a few months ago. Not even a picture of her anywhere.”
“I know.” She managed a small smile. “It’s my way. It’s not you. It’s just—everything.”
She carried the hat out of the kitchen saying, “You’ll clean up while I dress, hon. You promised.” And she was gone. He hadn’t promised but Kraft set about clearing the dishes, cold water for the stuff with eggs, hot water for the jellied plates.
From the corner of his eye he saw the light on the answering machine blinking. In the heat of the day, actual and otherwise, neither of them had checked for messages. Kraft hit the play button. It was his sister, Sarah, calling from Cambridge. Sarah, the smart sister, hare to his tortoise, calling to see how the Easterners were doing in the Southwest, calling to renew the invitation for Passover; the kids would love to see them. She was off for an endowed lecture on Wittgenstein at Oxford next week but please call back today. He thought how funny that he and Maureen had both been handed sisters they felt had more pizzazz, more zip.
He used the portable phone and called Cambridge. In a matter, it seemed, of seconds, Kraft surprised himself by pouring out the highway encounter and its aftermath. Without a beat, Sarah took the story in her own direction.
“You’re a real character, brother-mine,” she said. “The St. John Passion. That’s the one with the controversial text.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s famous. The anti-Semitic one. You know—blame it on the Jews—what happened to Jesus. I know some people, not necessarily Jews, won’t go to a performance, or they’ve been known to walk out.”
“I never heard—”
“I had a friend,” Sarah said, “who was applying for a job—arts administration, some fancy Jewish Y with poetry readings and an orchestra of their own. During the interview they asked her if she’d agree with their decision not to perform the St. John Passion. Because of the text. Excoriating the Jews instead of the Romans and so forth. She said, ‘What about the St. Matthew Passion? That was as bad or worse. “Let it be on our heads and on our children.” ’ No, she wouldn’t agree—she told them she thought Bach was Bach. She got the job, anyway.”
“Oh, my God.” He was quiet for a long moment or two.
“What? Ben, are you okay?”
He was not up to telling her about Maureen, the hat, the Catholic church. Instead, he let out something he didn’t know was boiling up. “What the hell is all this stuff? What do you mean I’m a real character? I know you’re in Cambridge and I’m only in a special Arts high school in a small city in Texas, but what’s the point of rubbing this business in my face, now of all times? Are you telling me all Christians are anti-Semitic? That if I’m moved by the music, if I perform the St. John, that I’m stupidly ignoring my enemies? For God’s sake, you remind me of Yvette and her wiseass talk. I thought I’d heard the last of that.”
In response Sarah offered a long silence. Kraft broke it. “Hey,” he said. “I’m on edge. Don’t listen to me.”
Sarah’s voice was flat, saddened. She rode past his outburst. “You never answered about Passover? The kids want to see you.”
“It doesn’t look likely. You know—Maureen and I both have new jobs. And thanks for the story, kiddo.”
He sat down at the still-uncleared table, the portable phone still in his hand. He couldn’t believe he’d compared his sister to his first wife. He remembered their trip to northern Italy and the exquisite St. Sebastian in the Ca D’oro in Venice. Tintoretto, he thought, not certain. But what he clearly remembered was how moved he had been in the little church in Assisi with the perfect simple Christs by Giotto covering the walls. They had been on one of those teacher’s tours, special rates, even lower for a winter trip, finding themselves snowbound in the lofty austerity of Perugia and then in the modest confines of Assisi. The sudden soft sifting of snow had practically closed down the little town. But the chapel was walking distance from the hotel, if you walked carefully, so there was something interesting you could do.
He remembered gazing with astonishment at the walls on which Giotto had sketched a cartoon version of ultimate, simple goodness. He remembered how a small line of monks had appeared out of some hidden part of the church and begun to sing a service. It sounded vaguely Gregorian or at least modal, and the hushed mood of esthetic worship was made perfect, as if the monks had been sent for that purpose. He remembered Yvette, keeping her hands warm with her little fur muff out of Tolstoy, the rest of her cool, ironic, saying, “This Jesus I think I went to school with. You know, the one who was a nice kid but slower than the rest. The one they made fun of at recess.”
It was the wrong moment for her cleverness, it brought him down. Yvette was nothing if not clever, and she knew wrong moments from right, but the marriage had been coming apart, leaving bits and pieces in beds and restaurants in cities all over the north of Italy, and her elegant timing was suddenly gone.
Kraft had ignored her and had turned towards the line of monks chanting devotions, curious. They were the expected assortment of young and middle-aged Italian men, about a dozen of them, holding prayer books which held their total attention. But one monk caught his eye, a startling Xerox of his father, Louis Kraft, rotund, wearing a brown floor-length robe with a tasseled cord instead of the familiar white terry cloth bathrobe; it was Louis, entire. God, why was he seeing his father here of all places? Louis the absent father, the professional skeptic, even during the infrequent, obligatory visits to the synagogue. He had died a year before, of a sudden stroke, taking all the unfinished angers between father and son with him. Were they to be reopened here in a twelfth-century chapel in a frozen Assisi?
Kraft was tempted to whisper something of this to Yvette, but she had burned a few too many bridges that week and now that afternoon and he said nothing. Then, with the unexpected magic of such moments, the ersatz Louis Kraft, the Italian monk standing about six feet away from him, looked up from his prayer book, missal, whatever it was Catholics used, wet his thumb with a quick swipe across his tongue and used the moistened digit to turn the page. It was a perfect replay of a gesture Kraft had seen his father perform on a thousand Rosh Hashanas and Yom Kippurs, the young Kraft sandwiched between his father and his grandfather, constantly losing his place in the ancient Hebraic chant, his father thumb-moistening page after page to bring his son to the right place.
The moment had turned so real as to become comic. Kraft cracked the spell, pointing out the monk/father to Yvette and they both fell into laughter as soon as they were outside in the frozen sunlight. A half-hour later he and Yvette were getting pleasantly bombed over lunch in a trattoria near the town square, ready for sensual play before dinner in the queen-sized bed at the hotel, ready for a talk that would turn intense, angry over dinner, ready for the series of little talks and big talks which would lead them far away from the cartoon goodness of Giotto to the hopeless years of confusion which would end only when Maureen arrived—kind, loving, without irony, safe.
When she reappeared in the kitchen she was like a vision from a children’s book: wine-colored dress, white gloves, beige hat, beige shoes, a Bible and her purse in her hands. She carried a white jacket.
“I spoke to Sarah,” he said. “She called. I told her we probably couldn’t make Passover there.”
Maureen nodded. “How do I look?”
Kraft told the truth. “Like an unconventional beauty tamed into a conventional style.”
“You’re too clever for me,” she said and laughed, truly laughed, for the first time that day. “Is that good or bad?”
“Like a pretty girl on her way to church,” he said. “Is that better?”
“Better. It’s my first Mass in five years.”
“Not since—?”
“Yes.”
Kraft thought, death, loss, mourning. The same things that can make you give up faith seemed to be the same things that can bring it on.
“I know this isn’t fun for you,” Maureen said.
“Well, I thought we had all this worked out.”
“I thought so too.”
She opened her purse and fiddled with a makeup case. “It was the things you said to the cop—they made me start thinking about how I used to feel when I went to Sunrise Mass on Easter morning with my mother. How consoled, how—shielded. And I couldn’t forget, ‘A man of sorrows,’ you said. ‘And acquainted with grief.’”
“I was wrong,” he said, helpless, irrelevant. “It’s not from the Passion. It’s Handel—the Messiah. Not Easter. It’s usually Christmas.”
She slipped the white jacket over her dress and turned to face him. “Ben, I’ve been acquainted with grief.”
“More than acquainted, Maureen. There aren’t many things worse than what you lost.”
The word “lost” tasted pallid on his tongue. What must it have been like watching a twin sister’s heart fail for four years, stopping her own clock, then starting to live again with half a heart.
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe so.”
“But my God, Maureen, I was just playing a foolish trick.”
She was outlining her mouth with lipstick now; a red slash against white skin. “I know,” she said. “Your trooper Birdwell took it one way. I just want to see which way I’m going to take it.” She kissed him a light good-bye, careful not to smudge her lipstick. “When I met you,” she said, “it never occurred to me I’d be spending the rest of my life with you. You were a musician, you were broke, you made me laugh, you were supposed to be just for fun. But here we are. When you start things, you can’t always know where they’re going to end, can you?”
Later he put together his scores for the St. John Passion and the Haydn 102nd just to be safe and was ready to head out for the school. He was not in the greatest mood to face his first rehearsal. It was only a run-through—whether of the Bach or the Haydn. A get acquainted session. But some of these students had passed statewide competitions to get into this school—the cream of the fiddlers, cellists, wind players. He would have to be up, at his best, not full of floating anxieties. Conducting was like teaching, you had to be keen, feel prepared. You couldn’t have even a fraction of your mind elsewhere.
Instead, Kraft recalled, from nowhere, his father at the end. Louis Kraft had become the president of the synagogue after a life of ironic pseudo-observance. The rabbi wanted to take Louis’s confession, had asked Kraft if he could come to the house. It had astonished agnostic, ignorant Kraft that Jews might do deathbed confessions, a ritual he’d assumed was confined to Catholics. It turned out that very orthodox Jews did. He repeated the rabbi’s request to his father, who had never liked the man, a Lubovitcher the synagogue had hired over his objections. Louis Kraft considered the idea for a moment, then said, from behind closed eyes, “Fuck him. The golden rule is all you need.” He slipped off an hour later.
The memory made Kraft laugh a little, which was what he needed to get himself going. The morning newspaper was lying on the doorstep, rolled up with a rubber band around it. He carefully stepped over it and left it lying there.
The auditorium was spanking new, the oak paneling shining and smelling of wood polish. It had a name, of course: The Joe Halliburton Memorial Hall. Everything here was named after some oil and gas prodigy: halls, buildings, seats in the auditorium, endowed chairs, concert series. The orchestra was assembling onstage; violins were being polished, resin slid along horsehair, oboists whittled reeds endlessly, horn players belched out low testing blasts, violists ran scales and light timpani taps sat beneath it all. It was always a happy moment for Kraft.
On a tall wooden stool he surveyed his small, personal kingdom. Eighty-five or so young people, many of them Asian, a sprinkling of Hispanics, a black trumpet player. In a few weeks he would know them all by name, would know their idiosyncrasies, their special gifts, limitations. This was the beginning.
At his right, the first cellist was trying to get his attention. She wore a name pin, the kind Officer Birdwell had worn: Melanie Rutherford. Kraft motioned for her to step up to the podium. Holding her cello behind her, she stood and said, “Doctor Kraft, I just wanted to tell you I’m thrilled at the opportunity of playing the cello solo in the St. John.”
“I see,” Kraft said. “You mean ‘Es Ist Vollbracht.’ It Is Finished.”
“Yes, sir.”
If she knew then they all knew. School scuttlebutt by now.
“But we’re scheduled to play the Haydn London Symphony. The D major.”
She actually blushed. “I read about it in the paper,” she said, her cello tilted against her breasts. “And it said you would conduct the St. John Passion because—anyway my teacher Mr. Fowler called me and said to start practicing it because it was so hard to melt the cello voice with the soprano …”
“It’s a duet with the contralto,” he said.
She was too embarrassed to go on. They all assume they know the whole story, Kraft thought. I’m the only one who doesn’t.
“Melanie,” he said. “I’m not sure if the Passion will be practical for this first season.” He paused.
“I’m also the librarian,” she said. “So I have to know what parts to put out.”
He stalled. “You don’t have any accent that I can hear. Are you from Texas?”
At the back of the auditorium a cellular phone trilled. A young man’s voice called, heavy with the bent inflections of the South, “Dr. Kr-a-eft”—every teacher in Texas was apparently called Dr. It made Kraft nervous at the same time as furnishing a small, illicit pleasure—”Mr. Basford would lahk to see you in his office.”
Melanie laid her cello down carefully against her chair. “I’m from Indiana,” she said. “Terre Haute.”
It was unpleasant from the moment Kraft saw Jordan Baines sitting next to Basford’s desk in a halo of cigarette smoke. More meddling was coming up. To make it worse, he knew they would not get to the matter at hand until a round of civilities had been worked through. It was a style Kraft sort of enjoyed—but not today, precisely not today. In the middle of Basford asking him how his wife was taking to life in Texas, Kraft said, “What brings you to the school today, Mister Baines?”
“Jordan,” Baines said. “Mister Baines is my father. Fact is, you didn’t sound all that sympathetic to the change in programming I suggested this mornin’. I am concerned.”
“I’m not too happy at using the school concert to illustrate an idea people may have about me.”
Basford stepped in quickly. “You know, Ben, there is a tradition of timing school concerts to events in the secular calendar and the Christian year. In the Middle Ages that was often the only way ordinary people tracked the flow of the year.”
“The banks all give out calendars these days,” Kraft said. “We agreed on a program: Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and the Haydn one-oh-two, the D major. There’s no reason to change it.”
Baines stood up, tall, graceful with success. He leaned towards Kraft for emphasis. “Surely, Ben, you will not deny that you have set this town a bit on its ear with a revelation of religious feeling made first to a police officer and then to the media. A revelation having a great deal to do with the crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
“As expressed in the music of Bach,” Kraft said as firmly as he could manage. “It should be no surprise to anyone that I’m someone mainly moved by music.”
“Nicely put,” Basford said quickly. “Of course the synergy of music and words is hard to separate. Love one, love the other. Some critics—”
But Baines wasn’t having any of Basford’s slick scholasticisms. He cut him off without a glance and stayed after Kraft. “You did express those sentiments, so widely reported, now didn’t you? I mean nobody would say what they didn’t mean about something as serious as the love of God, would they?” He was like one of those subtle, ironic police interrogators in the movies. The one who knows the suspect is lying and draws a circle of questions around him to get a final confession.
This was the moment, Kraft thought, to abort all the craziness, to exorcise a lie with another lie. It was the moment to tell them Birdwell had misunderstood his first remarks about the music, about Jesus, that the roller coaster ride ending with the reporter in the station house had begun with a simple misreading. It sounded lame. He might sell it in New York, not here, except that the whole mess would never have happened in New York. Better stick to professionalism.
“Whatever I said or might feel should not affect the program we agreed on. That’s all I’m saying.”
Baines crushed his cigarette. “Verily thou art neither hot nor cold but lukewarm. Therefore shall I vomit thee out of my mouth!” So much for the separation of personal feelings from public actions. If they were down to New Testament quotations Kraft was in dangerous territory.
But Baines was just getting started. “We have a chance to make a great statement of faith at the same time as putting this school on the map in a big way. That auditorium you conduct in downstairs, the Joe and Josephine Halliburton Hall? I could go to the Halliburton family and get this school enough money to choke a horse if this concert comes off with the right publicity. Enough for all kinds of scholarships, maybe a new building …”
The move from the high to the low ground and back was so startling it dizzied Kraft. He couldn’t fight on all these fronts at once. Basford moved in. “We’re all only concerned with the success of the school, Ben. Surely you see that.”
Whipsawed, all Kraft could say was, “Our agreement was that I would choose the programs with the consultation of the board.” He could hear that he sounded like a stubborn child. “Consultation is not control.”
Baines’s mouth turned down in disgust as if he’d seen a low blow, something dishonest.
“You speakin’ of your contract? Is that what?”
“Well, I suppose so.”
Baines sat down again. Some part of the struggle had shifted, perhaps ended. “I was a lawyer before I ever opened a company of my own and you know what I learned at the New York University Law School?”
Kraft was silent.
“I learned that a contract is only as good as the goodwill behind it.”
Threats and counterthreats: a moment for Basford to move in. “Talking about contracts is not what we need. We’re discussing a concert program.” He wove a comforting web of words … the need for personal beliefs to remain personal … give Ben a chance to think things over … the orchestra waiting for rehearsal downstairs …
This time it seemed to work. Baines stood up and took Kraft’s hand. He gazed at him with such steady, clear blue eyes. First Maureen, now Baines. Being gazed at like that was like being put in question; not a comfortable feeling. “I wonder exactly what you did mean to say back there on the highway—how you feel about it now. Sometimes doubt comes in and devours faith. The lion does not always lie down with the lamb.”
Drowning in a soup of metaphor Kraft mumbled something about keeping eighty-nine youngsters waiting, retrieved his hand and fled. He would not wait for the elevator and raced down the stairs instead, four flights. On the steps he was in a rage—not at being pushed around at the start of his new job, not at Basford’s slick scholarly manipulations or Jordan Baines’s mixture of Bible and business—a rage at himself, miserable in his own stubbornness. Who the hell was he, Benjamin Kraft, son of Lily and Louis Kraft, grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, to decide that his own feelings of independence were more important than the fervor of Art Birdwell, or the longing of Maureen Kraft, née Donovan, or even the excitement of a whole alien community about what they took to be a wonderful confirmation of their faith?
His mind whirls as he whips around landings … bits and pieces … at twenty, assistant conductor of the Kansas City Symphony, an intern really, almost no pay and no chance to front the orchestra, staying in a furnished room rented by the half-crippled Christian Science landlady Mrs. Gordon who asked if she might pray for him when he had the flu and he told her to please not do that, as if he were in the presence of something eerie, much more superstitious than poor Mrs. Gordon and her faith which had helped her arthritis so much… . Aunt Rose telling over and over, to anyone who’d listen, the story of the two-year-old Kraft baby, Joseph, gasping in an oxygen tent on the verge of giving up his brand new life … the rabbi going to synagogue and changing his name from Joseph to Benjamin so the Angel of Death, as the story went, wouldn’t find little Ben when he came for him… . He’d told the story once to an amused Koerschner, who’d said, “Ze rabbis think ze angel of death is zo dumb. If he’s zo stupid how come he’s still in business after all zese years? Trust me, Benjamin. Superstition will bring you bad luck every time.”
He pauses at the ground floor to catch his breath, his thoughts, some composure. He decides to call Art Birdwell that evening. There couldn’t be so many Art or Arthur Birdwells in the phone book. But he won’t explain—that would be cruel as well as dangerous. No, he will invite him to a concert. Even that might be dangerous, but Kraft felt he had to do something.
He will take an ad in the local newspaper (they only had one) apologizing to the town, to his dear Maureen, for the entire incident; will describe his agnostic background, tell how the music of the Passion had swept him away—claim that the state trooper had misunderstood his explanation. And to back up his decision not to yield, he will invoke his sister Sarah’s notions: the anti-Semitism implied in the text of St. John, of St. Matthew. He will take on centuries of theological history in one full-page ad. The ideas are getting loony. His ways out are even more clownish than his way in.
No, there is only one sensible way out: do the St. John. Never mind that it was Baines’s blackmail, that he would lose independence and control. He will sing the sublime song of cruelty, suffering and redemption they want from him. The audience of Texas parents and all the others will have a lunatic idea of what the new boy in town is feeling, up there in front of the chorus as they sing “Herr Unser Herrscher … Lord, our God …” There was nothing in the Passion about speeding tickets or lost driver’s licenses. But it was apparently too late to change any of that. What started in a rented car with a terrific tape deck could not be stopped—the strange music of that moment had even reached Maureen, unsettling the tricky tightrope walk she’d been doing since they’d met, upsetting the delicate balance he thought they’d arranged for their marriage.
Kraft had little breath left. He leaned against the wall, eyes shut. He saw his grandfather in childhood synagogues each Yom Kippur, rocking back and forth in ancient supplication, caught in a life and piety he obeyed but neither loved nor understood.
The players had scattered, sandwiches were being consumed in the front rows of the orchestra, books were being studied yellow markers in hand, onstage four string players took a Schubert quartet apart and attempted to put it back together.
Kraft faked an energy he couldn’t feel. “Okay,” he called out, clapping his hands. “Sorry for the delay. Places, please.” Next to the podium, sitting on Kraft’s tall stool, Melanie Rutherford, cellist and librarian, waited patiently.
“Big, boring meeting,” Kraft mumbled.
“I haven’t put out parts yet. You didn’t say—the Bach or the Haydn.” She looked at him with a different kind of gaze than he’d been getting that day, from his wife, from Baines. There was no speculation—only a respectful student asking a simple question, waiting for a simple answer.
He took a long breath. “The Haydn,” he said. “I’m sorry about the cello solo in the Passion. There’ll be other times.”
“No problem,” she said. “Give me a few minutes.” She raced off distributing parts to section leaders as players took their places and resumed the pleasant confusion of warming up.
Kraft opened his own Haydn score and waited, amazed at how easy it was to do what had to be done. Not the right thing, no such thing, just what had to be done. He rotated idly in his chair and saw, from the corner of his eye, that Basford and Baines were sitting in the back row, speaking softly, waiting.
He turned away and faced the stage. Enjoy your life because it respects you, Koerschner had written bewilderingly. Well, perhaps if he performed a Haydn symphony with precision and concern, a simple, secular song, with serious limits to spiritual ambitions; if he forgot for the moment his own grandiose ambitions—not the Maestro, never the Maestro—only the teacher/conductor guiding the Floyd Robbins High School of Performing Arts orchestra, occasional wrong notes and all, maybe then the conundrum would become clear, his life could respect him.
Melanie was back in her seat, her cello at the ready, bow in hand. She nodded. Kraft used no baton. He simply raised a hand and the delicious chaos of tuning and noodling, fragments of scales, concertos, a pop tune glimmering in between, all of it slowly simmered down at last to an apprehensive silence. Then, seized by a bitter need to play a quick trick on Basford, Baines and company, he leaned over towards the young cellist and said, “Melanie, do you know the beginning of ‘Es Ist Vollbracht’? It starts with the cello solo.”
Embarrassed, she nodded. “Play a little of it for me, the first phrases, would you?” Why not, he thought? Let them think for a minute that they’ve won. The whole adventure had begun with a trick; let it end with one.
Melanie ruffled some pages, then her cello sang a sweet opening, a descending, dying phrase. Vollbracht meant finished, ended, fulfilled. In the Passion, of course, it meant the completion of all that had been prophesied. The phrase was a lyrical swoon and when she played the D-sharp which began a change of key, she flushed, seemed moved almost to tears. On the other hand, Kraft thought, she might just be embarrassed at suddenly having to play in front of the other students. He did not turn to check a reaction at the rear of the orchestra. His little joke was finished. “Thank you, Melanie,” he said. “Well done.”
He signaled the concertmaster, who rose and in turn signaled the oboist to sound the A; a scramble of A’s and neighboring tones, then quiet.
“Let’s get acquainted with the Haydn,” Kraft said to the garden of upturned faces. “And with each other. Just a run-through of the first movement.”
He was ready to end all arguments, outside and in, ready to begin. Not for him the Bach Passions with their lofty rhetoric, their guilt and expiations. Just a Haydn symphony with its natural gaiety and when it turns sad never quite dark: all in the human scale, as if no one had ever thought of transcendence, as if no one had ever despaired of suffering and loss, as if no young girl had ever nursed a dying twin sister, who took the zip and pizzazz out of her own heart at the same time … as if no one had ever been unsatisfied enough, unhappy enough, here to imagine any place else … as if no one had ever felt so deep a pain at having to leave this extraordinary earth too soon, this extraordinary earth with its lucky gift of birdsong, its luckier gift of music, this extraordinary earth where, at one time or another, every kind of happiness seems possible.
He did not know in whose name he raised his hands, but he brought them down for the opening chord as firmly as if he did. It rang in the air, it rang inside him; a D major chord, nothing more, nothing less.
Simple. Sufficient. Entirely beautiful.
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