Yes: he could hear a design. Designs. An infinite number of designs within the one.
Then noise died down and all he could hear was a hum of voices, a steady monotone. Then a trumpet directly beneath his feet played five notes: B-flat for three beats, a low C-sharp for a beat, up to E for a beat then up an octave to E-flat for two, finishing with three beats again at B-flat.
He leaned out over the little balcony, swiveled left and right: no trumpet in sight. Leaned even farther, so that his legs were up in the air and he was in danger of falling.
Across the park: the answering notes in perfect imitation, but as if from the center of the galaxy.
It was an incredibly odd collection of notes. It made him think of Little Joe in the heavenly and hellish light.
He went inside, closed the French windows as upon a dream, and headed for the stairway, noting again the picture-like windows — which had not lost that quality of vivid immobility as the angle of the light changed and the sun began to flare on the ocean, and which now joined the five notes and the brilliant white light — staring back at them as he took the first two steps down, misstepping and flailing out for the handrail, skidding two or three steps before he could catch himself in the deepening darkness of the well.
On the stage he found the members of Mother’s “authentic” ensemble — a string quartet, a bass player, and a chamber organist — taking their instruments out of their cases. The organist was watching the stage manager and a few hands wrestle the ornate and unwieldy organ in place. Little Joe and Big Joe and a few of Joe’s brothers watched the hands grunt and shuffle and count off to each other. One of them was staring at the organist in some kind of disbelief or incredulity. Charles watched everybody watching everybody else.
The first violinist, a rugged-looking man who would not have seemed out of place directing traffic in and out of a placer mine, though quite old, was at his side before he knew it. He asked if Charles was going to hear Caruso, who was singing Don José in the Metropolitan Opera Company’s touring Carmen at the Mission Opera House that night.
“No excitement will be allowed,” said Charles. “Mother says we rehearse and hit the hay.”
“I wonder,” said the old man, “if she means to apply the prohibition to us.” Charles grinned at him in his superbly social way. “I’m not joking,” said the man, rather crossly, looking around in annoyance. He focused on the organ. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Charles agreed. It had been modeled, it was said, on the water organ carved into the pedestal of Theodosius’s Obelisk, built according to Mother’s specifications — that was the official line at any rate — by Moody and Billings in Detroit, a maker better known for their barrel organs, on one of which the organist had been rehearsing.
Referring to this, the old violinist said, “Ernst is delirious.”
No one on the bustling stage dared, it seemed, to enter the limelight, which was focused on two chalked X marks, where Charles and Mother were to stand when singing.
Mother walked into the light.
Was she beautiful, as people told him? Was she daunting, as people told him? Was she inexpressibly kind and sweet beneath the intricately worked armor of hyper-privileged can-do? When they sang the Stabat Mater, they were to seem a single voice, winding in and out of itself, moving away a note or two up or down the scale, or less, usually less, ceaselessly weaving sound, exchanging notes, while the quartet and continuo ticked away like a cosmic clock, or a pedal on a slowly spinning loom. his heavenly cherub-treble to “her darkly radiant, and yes, frankly imperial contralto”—the voice of not merely an ascendant United States of America but of a triumphant leader of the tired, old, confused or simply inferior nations of the world, a Statue of Liberty with a world-class voice, sixty years old, four children: Mother. In a way it was embarrassing to think of any part of one’s self as being “sinuous” with one’s mother’s self, not to mention “hauntingly sensuous,” but to hear it, to hear that single voice moving ineluctably toward two and back again to one, one note striving to become a different note, the second note striving to stay as it was — that was an altogether different matter. The voice had evolved and was part of a rising convergence that was very close to God.
Charles knew it and Mother knew it. And they both knew each other knew it.
“Ineluctable,” from the Latin for the struggle to be free or clear of something.
He had looked it up. Everything about it made him uneasy — or frightened him outright. This was why you knew how to talk about baseball and football, and why you took the trouble to be a good shot when killing sickened you. It was perhaps why Father responded to you so warmly, when all the talk on the surface was of more rising convergences, of Christian evolution and fate.
The second violinist played the five notes and Charles shivered. Had the first violinist noticed the shiver? What if he had? The second violinist must have heard them as Charles had. But would it do to ask him? He had to admit it, shivering, that he was afraid to ask. Mother’s intention in the early going was simply to do justice to Scarlatti père, to Alessandro (the father of the keyboard composer known and loved by generations of supple parlor virtuosi such as, for example, Father and Mother, Alexander, Andrew, and Amelia), a genius who had been made out by “the Victorians” to be some kind of villain who’d “nearly destroyed dramatic music.” Mother had commissioned the biography, and one thing led to another. and here they were: scholars of music, specialists in the baroque, Mother’s man in Napoli, leading figures in the “authentic practices” movement, seeking on behalf of and with the support of Mother — on her behalf because she was an incontestably great singer and with her support because she was incontestably wealthy — to recreate the way the music made by the Italians and their northern imitators sounded in 1650, in 1700, in 1750. so it was easy, on one hand, to say that the five melancholy notes that had apparently lodged in so many minds were, for Charles, merely pegs to hang his own anxiety on. but on the other hand, where had they come from and how had they come by their power?
Mother, in the limelight, sang the five notes, and Charles’s knees wobbled. He felt his rectal muscles loosen and he thought he might piss his pants as well. It was absurd, it was humiliating, and he did not understand it.
Mother was looking directly and intently at him as she spoke: “. a trumpeter in the band representing the Building Trades Council—” (described for her friends who were unfamiliar with San Francisco labor politics as a group of unions that passed knowledge and membership along only to the sons of union members with a guild-like sense of mastery and exclusion), “—played them in a lull, and a trumpeter in the band representing the San Francisco Labor Council—” (who sneered at such feudalism and were drawing dangerously near the controversial if not outright suicidal acceptance of negroes, the Chinese, the what-have-you, Indians from the Stone Age!), “—picked it up. It was so forlorn and lovely, but it seemed to be a battle cry, because the bands began to move in opposite directions, so as to meet somewhere on Union and do this tiresome thing which is all the rage now, march into each other’s ranks and fight out it, note for note, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” versus “La Marseillaise.” Whose tune will prevail and why? What a question! But those five calling notes — so strange! So enchanting!”
The house lights had gone down without Charles noticing. Mother spoke to him as if in a play in a dream. Plays within plays within plays — there was no end to it. No beginning. And that was the question: the question that could not be answered. One recognizes oneself, and in that recognition, listen closely, Charles, my poor darling boy, in that recognition one is spontaneously able to recognize all the other selves in the universe. One sees them, literally, as one encounters them, and extrapolates the infinite rest. Those which seem “rare and strange” are no different than those which seem ordinary: they are all complete and particularly themselves. And there, dear Charles, is where we come to ruin and sorrow as human beings. We see the particular and cannot conceive the whole, or sense the whole and cannot remember the particular. We cannot hold them both in our minds at once. It is impossible. Think of the rhomboid your mathematics tutor drew for you: the crystallographer Herr Necker’s cube. The soul tears itself to pieces knowing that it cannot know.