Tomorrow morning I shall visit Organic Unity Party headquarters and pose as a snarky old man with money. My new face suits me. I may have used a bit too much heat when I raised the cheekbones, but that merely makes me apple-cheeked, cute as hell, six feet two of short-tempered Santy Claus, talking slightly daown-East, and I’ve practiced a deadpan stare that comes in handy. I mean to be a potential angel for the campaign fund, not quite convinced but open to indoctrination. They’ll lay down some kind of carpet. If Billy Kell is in there I’ll smell him out.
Now I can turn to something that has lightened my 355 years.
After I left Latimer, to follow up a rumor that someone had seen a kid hitchhiker twenty miles out of town, I knew that the police were not uninterested in Benedict Miles. I had my new face, and it seemed best to inform Mrs. Wilks, through Toronto, that Miles had died, leaving the school provided for in his will. Less harassed and hurried judgment might have produced something better than that, but once it was done I couldn’t undo it. Mrs. Wilks wrote faithfully to the Toronto “trustees” until two years ago, and the Communicator sent her letters on to me when possible — often I had no address. Two years ago Sophia’s sister died. Sophia turned the school over to a successor, and took Sharon to London, feeling that her own teaching could carry the girl no further. Sharon’s family wasn’t mentioned in that last letter. I have not been too severely distressed by my separation from the child I loved, because I have known that, chance permitting, I would hear of her again. When I came to New York last week, Sharon’s debut was in the announcements. This evening she played, in Pro Arte Hall.
It is a new auditorium, part of a splendid development along the Hudson. You wouldn’t recognize New York, Drozma. I almost didn’t, for the last good view I had of it was back in 30,946. I have passed through a few times in the nine years, but with scarcely a chance to pause.
In the ’960s New York decided to make its waterfront beautiful instead of hideous. A great Esplanade runs from George Washington Bridge to Twenty-third Street, with tall buildings at intervals, some set back among the lower structures on the inner side of the Esplanade, others rising sheer from the river. They tell me the railroad still rumbles down below. Dock facilities have actually been expanded, but it doesn’t look so: to come in on a ship or ferry is to enter an archway in a gleaming cliff. When I have lime, think I’ll go over to Jersey in order to come back on one of the chubby Diesel ferries and see for myself. The heavy automotive traffic on the second level is not felt up on the Esplanade, as you don’t feel it when you walk on the upper levels of the north-and-south avenues. On the Esplanade you have only the sky, the graceful buildings, human beings, and the Hudson River wind that now seems not hostile, gritty, and snarling but a refreshing part; of the city’s majesty. It was difficult to have any patience with New York in the old days. Times change. Hell’s Kitchen was wiped away long ago; blest if I know what they did with Grant’s Tomb but I’m sure it’s tucked in down there somewhere. This waterfront was planned soon after they snatched the city from the politicians and tried the manager system. They have kept out catchpenny concessions. On the wide Esplanade itself not even bicycles are allowed, though children are everywhere.
The city’s resident population has gone down by about a million, with corresponding increase in the huge arc of the metropolitan district. There’s revival of the old proposal to make the district a separate state. Civic groups kick the idea around. One in particular is gathering petition signatures and doing spadework in Congress. They want the new state to be named Adelphi. I’ve got no objections.
Pro Arte Hall is high up in one of the buildings rising directly from the river — clean-shining steel and stone and glass. Conditioned as we have been, Drozma, to the hidden life, we’ll never quite know how they do it. These buildings are wholly human, artifacts of their complex science, yet married to nature also, to wind and sky, stars and sun.
The auditorium itself is severe. Cold white and self-effacing gray. Nothing irrelevant to tickle or distract the eye, only an uncomplicated stage and stern classical dignity of the piano. (But it was good, during intermission, to go into a lounge and find, beyond its glass west wall, an open space from which one looked down to the river. How far down I don’t know. A bright liner passing downstream was a playroom toy. In spite of the March chill I was happy to watch it until the bell rang for the second half of Sharon’s miracle.)
Few in the audience knew anything about her, I think. Just one more New York debut. I had a case of nerves, my heartbeat shaking me each minute. I read the program a dozen times, and knew nothing of what it said except that the first number was the Bach G Minor Fugue.
Then she was there. Slim, slight, seeming tall — oh, I’d known that! In white. I’d known that too. Her corsage was a tiny cluster of blue scillas and snowdrops, absurdly modest. She still wore her brown hair shoulder-length, misty with strange lights. She didn’t find it necessary to smile. Her bow was almost perfunctory. (She has told me she was totally petrified, couldn’t bow deeper for fear of going over flat on her face.) I remembered Amagoya.
She seated herself, touched her palms with a handkerchief, adjusted the long skirt to clear her ankles. Dimly I knew she was still sort of snub-nosed. Somewhere there must have been a red rubber ball on a string….
Then I had to pay her the best compliment: forgetting her. The fugue took hold with clear-cut authority. What unreal and therefore eternal cities did Bach know, to create his architecture out of the marble of dreams? Was the G Minor written after his blindness? I don’t remember. Not that it matters: his visions need no common eyesight. It was as if Sharon had said (to all of us): “Come here with me. I can show you what I saw.” No other way to play Bach, but who at nineteen is supposed to know that?
In spite of the fugue’s enormous ending there was not the usual burst of excitement killing the last chord. Instead they gave her some seconds of that enchanted silence all human performers pray to receive (an experience I can’t quite share, since Martian audiences grant the silence as a matter of course, for music’s sake). When the crash came it was not prolonged, for Sharon did smile then, and the shy grimace touched off sympathetic laughter, a way of saying they loved her, and the applause broke off short at the merest half turn of her head back to the piano.
The rest of the first half was all Chopin. The sonata; three nocturnes; two mazurkas; the F Sharp Minor Impromptu, which I think is the extremest distillation of Chopin, a union of ecstasy and despair nearly unbearable. Sharon thinks so, played it so. Even with that still burning inside us, we demanded an encore at the end of the first half, a thing unheard of nowadays. When the shouts were unmistakable, she gave us the little first Prelude, as she might have tossed a flower to a lover who deserved it but wasn’t too bright. Pianissimo all the way through, disregarding the conventional dynamic marks: like opening a window on a waterfall and closing it before you can guess what the river is saying. I never played it like that. Frederic Chopin didn’t, when I heard him in 30,848, but I don’t believe he’d have minded. I can’t fathom the phonograph-intellects who insist on “definitive interpretation.” You might as well insist, when a friend gives you a jewel, that only one facet may be looked at, world without end. You might as well ask for a definitive moonrise. Sharon grinned after that tour de force — not a definitive grin either, a big human one. She ran off. The lights went up.
It was an uncommonly long program, especially for a debut. A newcomer is still expected to be humble before tradition. A chunk of Bach for the critics, a chunk of Beethoven, maybe some Schumann to fill in the cracks, Chopin to prove you’re a pianist, finally a scintillant gob of Liszt for bravura and schmaltz. Sharon had paid her respects with Bach all right — what Bach! — but only because she wanted to. My mangled scrap of program told me the second half began with a suite by Andrew Carr, an Australian composer not known till a year ago. And it ended with Beethoven, Sonata in C, Opus 53.