Orfeo (2 page)

At twenty-one, Els had worshipped at the shrine of Wagner. So he knew about Peps, Wagner’s spaniel muse and the cowriter of
Tannhäuser.
Peps would lie at Wagner’s feet under the piano while he worked. If a passage didn’t please Peps, the dog leapt up on the desk and howled until Wagner abandoned the idea. There were years when Els could have used such a candid critic, and Fidelio might have obliged. But Els had stopped writing music by the time Fidelio came along.

Like Peps, Fidelio was good health to her owner. She reminded Els when to eat or walk. And she asked for nothing in return but to be part of the two-dog pack, loyal to her alpha and free to howl whenever the music played.

Els read about other musical dogs. There was the bulldog Dan, immortalized in the eleventh of Elgar’s
Enigma Variations,
who growled at out-of-tune singers. The bull terrier Bud had performed a Stephen Foster medley in the White House for Eleanor and Franklin D., five years before Peter was born. Thirty years later, as Els wandered through a John Cage Happening in Urbana, Illinois, Lyndon Johnson and his mutt Yuki performed a duet on camera for a stupefied nation. In the three short decades from Bud to Yuki, biplanes had given way to moon rockets and Aldis lamps had become the ARPANET. Music had gone from Copland to Crumb, from “A Fine Romance” to “Heroin.” But nothing at all had changed in the music of dogs.

Fidelio’s appetite for singing never wavered. Not for her, the insatiable need for novelty. She never tired of warhorses, but neither did she recognize anything Els played her, however often she heard it. A permanent, moving dance, in an eternal Standing Now: that’s how she took in every piece they listened to together, night after night, for years. Fidelio loved all the great landmarks of the twentieth century, but she perked up just as happily to the digital chimes of an ice-cream truck from blocks away on a summer’s evening. Hers was a connoisseurship Els would have traded his for, in a heartbeat.

I had no idea what might happen. That’s the trouble with making things. You never do.

Was tonality
out there
—God-given? Or were those magic ratios, like everything human, makeshift rules to be broken on the way to a more merciless freedom? Fidelio became Els’s lab animal, his experiment in musical universals. The dog got excited simply watching Els fetch the scuffed clarinet case of his childhood. Duet time again: she’d start baying before Els played a note. The first thing to check was octave equivalence. Els held a tone, and the dog answered in a mournful interval. But if the clarinet jumped an octave, the dog held steady, as if the pitch hadn’t changed at all.

The experiment convinced Els that his dog heard octaves much as humans did. Octaves were built into the body, a truth that held not only across cultures but over genomes. Run from
Do
to
Do
, no matter how you divvied up the steps in between, and even other species heard the pitches double back on themselves, like a color wheel.

Only a crazy person would care. But Fidelio’s response thrilled Els. It returned him to all those years in the wilderness, pushing the human ear toward places it wouldn’t gladly go, searching through musical math for a shortcut to the sublime. Fidelio, that happy creature baying at the whims of Els’s clarinet, hinted at something in music beyond taste, built into the evolved brain.

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music’s exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

He still believed the thing was there. But with his dog dead and he himself on the waiting list, he no longer believed he’d find it in this lifetime.

Maybe I made a mistake. But Cage says: A “mistake” is beside the point. Once anything happens, it authentically is
.

He went out to the backyard with a flashlight, a shovel, and a lump wrapped in a quilt. He picked a spot by a line of boxwoods that Fidelio had loved to mark. Already, the little plot was covered over with a dense mat of weed species. Life traded in a profligate overkill that never failed to stun him. Els set the flashlight into the crook of a honeysuckle, took up the shovel, and dug.

The thump of his sole on the rung and the snick of the shovel whiffing into stony earth set a calming two-step. When the hole was deep enough to hold the companion of his late years, he put down the shovel and picked up the body. Fidelio now felt light, like something had left her in the hour and a half since she’d died.

He stood on the edge of the hole, considering the quilt. His ex-wife had made it from their spent clothes more than forty years ago, in the happiest stretch of their shared years. The quilt was large and luminous, in deep shades of cerulean, jade, emerald, and chartreuse. The pattern was called Night in the Forest, and Maddy had taken almost two years to complete it. Alongside the set of cloud chamber bowls, it was the finest thing Els owned. Sanity demanded that he salvage, clean, and leave it on a shelf for his daughter to find when he died. But Fidelio had died in this quilt, the most uncomprehending of deaths, comforted only by the familiar coverlet. If humans had a soul, surely this creature did. And if humans did not, then no gesture here was too fine or ridiculous. Els apologized to Maddy, whom he hadn’t seen in decades, and placed the bundle into the earth.

The quilt-wrapped corpse nestled in the pit of loam. By the flashlight’s glow, Night in the Forest glistened in rich, cool tones. For a moment, those dark greens redeemed all the pain that he and Maddy had ever inflicted on each other.

Humming to himself a slowly unfolding upward phrase, Els picked up the shovel again. Six times in the course of his seven decades, he’d been forced to remember how grief made you love the smallest, most mistaken thing. This was the seventh.

A voice said,
What are you doing?
Els gasped and dropped the shovel.

Startled by that startle, the voice called out,
It’s me.

Standing on a lawn chair, the neighbors’ eight-year-old peeked out over the slats of the wooden fence. Eight-year-old children, wandering around unsupervised in the middle of the night. Els couldn’t remember the boy’s name. Like all boys’ names in the age of social networking, it began with a J.

What’s that?
J asked in a silky whisper.

I’m burying my dog.

In
that?

It’s like a grave offering.

J knew all about grave offerings from multiplayer online games.

You can bury them in your yard?

She liked it back here
.
Nobody has to know, right?

Can I see it?

No,
Els said.
She’s peaceful now.

Els picked up the shovel and scooped dirt into the hole. J watched, rabid with interest. He’d seen several thousand deaths already in his young life. But a careful burial was the wildest novelty.

The hole became a modest mound. Els stood over it, looking for the next step in this ad hoc service.

She was a good dog, Fidelio. Very smart.

Fidelio?

Her name.

That’s long for Fido or something?

This dog could sing. This dog could tell pretty chords from harsh ones.

Els didn’t mention that she preferred the harsh ones.

J looked suspicious.
What did she sing?

Everything. She was very broad-minded.
Els took the flashlight and waved it toward the fence.
You think we should try to sing something for her?

J shook his head.
I don’t know any sad songs. Except for the funny ones.

I wanted to remember how life really worked and see if chemistry still wanted something from me.

Eight-year-old Peter hides in the pantry of his mock-Tudor home, cowering in his Gene Autry pajamas, spying on his parents, flouting every law of God and man. He doesn’t care about being caught. He’s doomed already, anyway. The Reds had exploded an A-bomb weeks before, and Karl Els has told the assembled fathers of the neighborhood, over ribs barbequed in an enormous pit, that the planet has another five years, tops. The cookout is the neighborhood’s last hurrah. With the ribs gone, all those condemned fathers and their wives gather around the Els Hammond chord organ, a gin glass in every other hand, a chorus of sloshed innocents singing goodbye. They sing:

There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s Stream,

and the nightingale sings ’round it all the day long.

Big brother Paul is asleep in the attic bedroom, one story above. Susan frets in her crib at the foot of the stairs. And Peter stands in the surge of these chords, listening to America’s farewell song. The notes float and rise. They turn speech as pointless as a radio ventriloquist. Light and darkness splash over Peter at each chord change, thrill with no middleman. The pitches topple forward; they fall beat by beat into their followers, obeying an inner logic, dark and beautiful.

Another milky, troubled chord twists the boy’s belly. Several promising paths lead forward into unknown notes. But of all possible branches, the melody goes strange. One surprise leap prickles Peter’s skin. Welts bloom on his forearms. His tiny manhood stiffens with inchoate desire.

The drunken angel band sets out on a harder song. These new chords are like the woods on the hill near Peter’s grandmother’s, where his father once took them sledding. Step by step the singers stumble forward into a thicket of tangled harmonies.

Something reaches out and trips the tune. His mother’s fingers lose their way. She stabs at several keys, all of them wrong. The gin-waving singers tumble laughing into a ditch. Then, from his hiding place, the pajama-boy sings out the pitches of the lost chord. The ensemble turns to face the intruder. They’ll punish him now, for breaking more rules than anyone can count.

His mother tries the suggested chord. It’s startling but obvious—better than the one she was searching for. The gin-soaked singers cheer the child. Peter’s father crosses the room and nips him on the rump, sends him back up to bed with a suspended sentence.
And don’t come back down unless we need you again!

TWO MONTHS LATER, young Peter stands clutching his clarinet in the wings at his first citywide competition. Every pleasure, he has already learned, must turn into a contest. His mother wants to spare him the gladiator ritual. But his father, who—so claims brother Paul—killed a German rifleman in the war, declares that the best way to protect a boy from public judgment is to subject him to heavy doses.

Someone calls Peter’s name. He stumbles onstage, his head full of helium. Bowing to the room of utter blackness, he loses his balance and staggers forward. The full house laughs. He sits down to play his piece, Schumann’s “Of Strange Lands and People.” His accompanist waits for a nod, but Peter can’t remember how the tune starts. His arms ooze jelly. Somehow his hands remember the way. He blows through the piece too fast, too loud, and by the time he finishes he’s in tears. The applause is his cue to run offstage, humiliated.

He ends up in the bathroom, puking his guts into the toilet. Vomit flecks his clip-on bow tie when he comes out to face his mother. She wraps his head into her breastbone and says,
Petey. You don’t have to do this anymore
.

He pulls free of her, horrified.
You don’t understand
.
I
have
to play
.

He wins second prize in his age group—a pewter G clef that his parents put on the mantelpiece next to his brother’s 1948 little league Division B fielding trophy. Three decades later, the thing will turn up wrapped in newspaper in his mother’s attic, a year after her death.

I’d been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our funerals.

Carnegie Elementary, Fisk Junior, Rockefeller High: Peter Els survives them all, propelled from Dick and Jane to gerunds and participles, the
Monitor
and
Merrimac
, Stanley and Livingstone, tibias and fibulas, acids and bases. He memorizes “Hiawatha’s Childhood,”
“Ozymandias,” and “The New Colossus”; their rich dotted rhythms fill the dead spots of his late afternoons.

By twelve, he masters the mystic slide rule’s crosshair. He toys with square roots and looks for secret messages in the digits of pi. He calculates the area of countless right triangles and maps the ebb and flow of French and German armies across five hundred years of Europe. Teachers rotate like the circle of fifths, each of them insisting that childhood give way to accumulating fact.

He loves his music lessons best. Week by month by year, the clarinet yields to him. The études his teachers assign unlock ever more elaborate and enchanted places. He seems to be something of a native speaker.

It’s a gift
, his mother says.

A talent,
his father corrects.

His father, too, is obsessed with music, or at least with ever-higher fidelity. Every few months, Karl Els invests in clearer, finer, more powerful components until the speakers cabled to his vacuum tube stereo amp are bigger than a migrant worker’s bungalow. On these he bombards his family with light classics. Strauss waltzes.
The Merry Widow.
The man blasts, “I am the very model of a modern Major General,” until their pacifist neighbor threatens to call the police. Every Sunday afternoon and four nights a week, young Peter listens to the records spin. He combs through the changing harmonies, now and then hearing secret messages float above the fray.

And it’s on his father’s stereophonic rig that Peter, age eleven, first hears Mozart’s
Jupiter
. A rainy Sunday afternoon in October, boggy hours of excruciating boredom, and who knows where the other kids are? Upstairs listening to
The Blandings
or
The Big Show,
playing jacks or pickup sticks, or spinning the bottle down in Judy Breyer’s basement. Deep in Sunday malaise, Peter works his way through his father’s micro-groove records, looking for the cure to his perpetual ache that must be hiding somewhere inside those colored cardboard sleeves.