The Infinity Concerto (2 page)

Waltiri's eyes sparkled. For the next two months, Michael spent most of his free time in the Waltiri house, listening to him recite selections on the piano or carefully play the fragile masters of the scores. It had been a wonderful two months, almost a justification for being bookish, something of a loner, buried in his mind instead of hanging out with friends....

Now Michael stood on the porch of Clarkham's house. He tried the handle on the heavy wooden door; locked, as expected. He removed the key from his pants pocket. It was late for the old neighborhood. There was no street traffic, not even the sound of distant airplanes. Everything seemed to have been muffled in a blanket.

Two months before, on a hot, airless August day, Waltiri had taken Michael up to the attic to look through papers and memorabilia. Michael had exulted over letters from Clark Gable, correspondence with Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a manuscript copy of a Stravinsky oratorio.

"Up here, it feels like it's the forties again," Michael said. Waltiri stared down at lines of light thrown by a wall vent across a stack of boxes and said, "Perhaps it is." He looked up at Michael. "Let's go downstairs and get some iced tea. And on the way - instead of my talking about myself - on the way, I would like you to tell me why you want to be a poet."

That was difficult. Sitting on the porch, Michael sipped from his glass and shook his head. "I don't know. Mom says it's because I want to be difficult. She laughs, but I think she means it." He made a wry face. "As if my folks should worry about me being different. They're not your normal middle-class couple, either. She might be right. But it's something else, too. When I write poetry, I'm more in touch with being alive. I like living here. I have some friends. But. it seems so limited. I try hard to find the flavor, the richness, but I can't. There has to be something more." He rubbed his cheek and looked at the fallen magnolia blossoms on the lawn. "Some of my friends just go to the movies. That's their idea of magic, of getting away. I like movies, but I can't live in them."

The composer nodded, his slate-gray eyes focused on the distance above the hedges bordering the yard. "You think there's something higher than what we see - or lower - and you want to find it."

"That's it." Michael nodded.

"Are you a good poet?"

"Not very," Michael said automatically.

"No false modesty now." Waltiri wiped condensation from his glass on the knee of his pants.

Michael thought for a moment. "I'm going to be."

"Going to be what?"

"I'm going to be a good poet."

"That's a fine thing to say. Now that you've said it, you know I'll be watching you. You must become a good poet."

Michael shook his head ruefully. "Thanks a lot!"

"Think nothing of it. We all need someone to watch over us. For me, it was Gustav Mahler. I met him when I was eleven years old, and he asked me much the same thing. I was a young piano player - how do they say - a prodigy. 'How good will you be?' he asked after he heard me perform. I tried to dodge the question by acting like a young boy, but he turned his very intense dark eyes on me and said again, 'How good?' Because I was cornered, I puffed up and said, 'I'll be very good.' And he smiled at me! What a benediction that was. Ah, what a moment! Do you know Mahler?"

He meant Mahler's music, and Michael didn't.

"He was my god. The sad German. I worshiped him. He died a few months after we met, but somehow I felt he still watched me, he would still be disappointed if I didn't make something of myself."

By early September, Waltiri had taken Michael even further into his confidence. "When I began to write music for movies, I was a little ashamed," he said one evening when Michael came over for dinner. "Even though my first score was for a good movie, Trevor Howard in Ashenden. Now I have no regrets, but I thought then, what would my heroes say about writing for silly films? Still, it was next to impossible to work otherwise. I had married Golda in 1930, and we had to live. Times were hard then.

"But always before me was the shining splendor of perhaps doing serious music, concert hall material. I wrote some on the side - piano pieces, cantatas, exactly the opposite of the big orchestral scores for the studios. A little has even been recorded recently, because I am so well-known as a film composer. I wanted to do an opera - how I loved the libretti of Hofmannsthal, and how I envied Richard Strauss that he lived in a time when such things were easier! 'Dream and reality are one, together, you and I alone, always together. to all eternity.' 'Geht all's sonst wie ein Traum dahin vor meinem Sinn." He laughed and shook his head. "But I am wandering.

"I had one last fling with serious music. And." Waltiri paused in the dim, candlelit dining room, his eyes again focused on the distance, this time piercing a framed landscape over the china cupboard. "A very serious fling it was. A man my own age then, perhaps a little older, by the name of David Clarkham approached me at Warner Brothers one day. I remember it was raining, but he didn't wear a raincoat.just a gray wool suit, without any drips on it. Not wet, you understand?"

Michael nodded.

"We had some mutual acquaintances. At first, I thought maybe he was just another studio vulture. You know the kind, maybe. They hang around, bask in other peoples' fame and fortune, live off parties. 'Lounge lizards,' somebody called them. But it turned out he was knowledgeable about music. A charming fellow. We got along well. for a time.

"He had some theories about music that were highly unusual, to say the least." Waltiri went to a glassed-in bookcase, lifted a door, and withdrew a small thick volume in a worn wrapper. He held it out for Michael's inspection. The title was Devil's Music and the author was Charles Fort.

"We worked together, Clarkham and I. He suggested orchestrations and arrangements; I composed." Waltiri's expression became grim. His next words were clipped and ironic. "'Arno,' he tells me - we are good friends by this time - 'Arno, there shall be no other music like this. Not for millions of years have such sounds been heard on Earth.' I kidded him about dinosaurs breaking wind. He looked at me very seriously and said, 'Someday you will understand what I mean.' I accepted he was a little eccentric, but also brilliant. He appealed directly to my wish to be another Stravinsky. So. I was a sucker. I applied his theories to our composition, using what he called 'psychotropic tone structure.'

"'This,' he tells me, 'will do exactly what Scriabin tried to do, and failed.'" Michael didn't know who Scriabin was, but Waltiri continued as if with a long-rehearsed speech.

"The piece we wrote, it was my forty-fifth opus, a concerto for piano and orchestra called 'Infinity.'" He took the book from Michael's hand and opened it to a marked passage, then handed it back. "So we get infamous. Read, please."

Michael read.

"Or of strange things musical.

"A song of enchantment.

"Judge as you will, here is the data:

"That on November 23rd, 1939, a musician created a work of undeniable genius, a work which changed the lives of famous men, fellow musicians. This man was Arno Waltiri, and with his new concerto, Opus 45, he created a suitable atmosphere for musical catastrophe.

"Picture it: a cold night, Los Angeles, the Pandall Theater on Sunset Boulevard. Crowds in black silk hats, white tie and tails, long sheer gowns, pouring in to hear a premier performance. Listen to it: the orchestra tuning, cacophonic. Then Waltiri raising his baton, bringing it down.

"We are told the music was strange, as no music heard before. Sounds grew in that auditorium like apparitions. We are told that a famous composer walked out in disgust. And. then, a week later, filed suit against Waltiri! 'I am unable to hear or compose music in a sensible fashion!' he said in the court deposition. And what did he blame? Waltiri's music!

"Consider it.

"What would prompt a well-known and respected composer to sue a fellow composer for an impossible - so doctors tell us - injury? The case was dropped before it ever reached court. But. what did that concerto sound like?

"I submit to you, perhaps Waltiri knew the answer to an age-old question, namely, 'What song did the sirens sing?'"

Michael closed the book. "It's not all nonsense," Waltiri said, returning it to the shelf. "That is roughly what happened. And then, months later, twenty people disappear. The only thing they have in common is, they were in the audience for our music." He looked at Michael and lifted his eyebrows. "Most of us live in the real world, my young friend. but David Clarkham. I am not so sure. The first time I saw him, coming out of the wet with his suit so dry, I thought to myself - 'The man must walk between raindrops.' The last time I saw him it was also raining, in July of 1944. Two years before, he had bought a house a few blocks from here. We didn't see each other often. But this wet summer day he comes to stand on our porch and gives me a key. 'I'm going on a trip,' he says. 'You should have this, in case you ever wish to follow me. The house will be taken care of.' Very mysterious. With the key there is a piece of paper."

Waltiri took a small teak box from the top of the bookshelf and held it before Michael, pulling up the lid. Inside was a yellowed, folded paper, and wrapped partly within, a tarnished brass house key. "I never followed him. I was curious, but I never had the courage. And besides, there was Golda. How could I leave her? But you. you are a young man."

"Where did Clarkham go?" Michael asked.

"I don't know. The last words he said to me, he says, 'Arno, should you ever wish to come after me, do everything on the paper. Go to my house between midnight and two in the morning. I will meet you." He removed the note and key from the box and gave them to Michael. "I won't live forever. I will never follow. Perhaps you."

Michael grinned. "It all sounds pretty weird to me."

"It is very weird, and silly. That house - he told me he did a great deal of musical experimentation there. I heard very little of it. As I said, we weren't close after the premiere of the concerto. But once he told me, "The music gets into the walls in time, you know. It haunts the place'

"He was a brilliant man, Michael, but he - how do you say it? - he 'screwed me over.' I took the blame for the concerto. He left for two years. I settled the lawsuits. Nothing was ever decided in court. I was nearly broke.

"He had made me write music that affects the way a person thinks, as drugs affect the brain. I have written nothing like it since."

"What will happen if I go?"

"I don't know," Waltiri said, staring at him intently. "Perhaps you will find what lives above or below the things we know."

"I mean, if something happened to me, what would my parents think?"

"There comes a time when one must disregard the thoughts of one's parents, or the warnings of old men, when caution must be temporarily put aside and instincts followed. In short, when one must rely on one's own judgment." He opened another door in the bookcase. "Now, my young friend, before we become sententious, I've been thinking there is one other thing I'd like to give to you. A book. One of my favorites." He pulled out a pocket-sized book bound in plain, shiny black leather and held it out for Michael.

"It's very pretty," Michael said. "It looks old."

"Not so very old," Waltiri said. "My father bought it for me when I left for California. It's the finest poetry, in English, all my favorites. A poet should have it. There is a large selection of Coleridge. You've read him, I'm sure."

Michael nodded.

"Then, for me, read him again."

Two weeks later, Michael was swimming in the backyard pool when his mother came out on the patio with a peculiar expression. She brushed back a strand of her red hair nervously and shielded her eyes against the sun. Michael stared at her from poolside, his arm flesh goose-bumping. He almost knew.

"That was Golda on the phone," she said. "Arno's dead."

There was no funeral. Waltiri's ashes were placed in a columbarium at Forest Lawn. There were features on his death in the newspaper and on television.

That had been six weeks before. Michael had last spoken with Golda two days ago. She had sat on the piano bench in her front room, straight-backed and dignified, wearing a cream colored suit, her golden hair immaculately coifed. Her accent was more pronounced than her husband's.

"He was sitting right here, at the piano," she said, "and he looked at me and said, 'Golda, what have I done, I've given that boy Clarkham's key. Call his parents now.' And his arm stiffened - - He said he was in great pain. Then he was on the floor." She looked at Michael earnestly. "But I did not tell your parents. He trusted you. You will make the right decision."

She sat quietly for a time, then continued. 'Two days later, a tiny brown sparrow flew into Arno's study, where the library is now. It sat on the piano and plucked at pieces of sheet music. Arno had once made a joke about a bird being a spirit inside an animal body. I tried to shoo it out the window, but it wouldn't go. It perched on the music stand and stayed there for an hour, twisting its head to stare at me. Then it flew away." She began to cry. "I would dearly love for Arno to visit me now and then, even as a sparrow. He is such a fine man." She wiped her eyes and hugged Michael tightly, then let him go and straightened his jacket.

"He trusted you," she had repeated, tugging gently at his lapel. "You will know what is best."

Now he stood on the porch of Clarkham's house, feeling resigned if not calm. Night birds sang in the trees lining the street, a sound that had always intrigued him for the way it carried a bit of daylight into the still darkness.

He couldn't say precisely why he was there. Perhaps it was a tribute to a friend he had known for so short a time. Had Waltiri actually wanted him to follow the instructions? It was all so ambiguous.

He inserted the key in the lock.

To discover what is above or below.

He turned the key.

Music haunts the place now.

The door opened quietly.

Michael entered and shut the door tight behind him. The brass workings clicked.