“Well ma’am, it is a rewarding feeling to stand like this out here in the fresh good air of the countryside and to find these two gentlemen, both outstanding in their professions and achieving so much in their lives, now both resting here in peace.”
“You’re staring at that stone there.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you thinking about.”
“Epitaphs.”
“Such as.”
“Men are slow to gain their wisdom and faster to become fools.”
“You know Stephen, sometimes when you say something, I feel I am meeting you for the first time. Do you believe in God.”
“Well ma’am, I guess there’s got to be somebody like that somewhere. A guy comes into Horn and Hardart on Fifty-seventh Street saying he is. Do you believe in God.”
“Having been self-sufficient unto myself I have never felt I had any need of a God but often wonder if with no one to turn to in terrible trouble, I would become religious. But you do, don’t you, in so loving your music, have a religion. But recently you have you know, rather made me feel that one has been listening to Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade Mélancolique. Ah, that at last has put a smile on your face. You see, I am boning up on my musicology. Tchaikovsky, he did didn’t he, write so much.”
“He did ma’am, and by the way, Tchaikovsky’s Sérénade Mélancolique does have some very forcefully exuberant passages.”
“Well, I suppose my accumulating musical knowledge is bound to leave me occasionally feeling like I’m plunging over Niagara Falls in a barrel, hoping my ignorance is not to be revealed with the barrel breaking up in the turmoil of water below.”
“I should be glad, ma’am, to save you from drowning and swim with you to shore.”
“And if I were like a bottle full of fizz with the stopper jammed in, would you pull it out.”
“I should be most glad to, ma’am.”
“Come on. We’re going back to New York.”
Her smile radiating from her face as one eye winked and the other stayed brightly sparkling under her wonderful eyebrows, as if they sheltered the gleam that came glowing warm out of this woman’s soul. As her hand grabs mine and leads me now out of glumness down this little grassy incline. To the long black shining sleekness of this limousine. The door clunking closed with its heavy thud. As we go bulletproof back to the silvery towering skyscrapers. People say they like New York because there are people there. And here we sit side by side, at opposite economic poles of the universe, our minds married by the faintly heard music of all these wheels humming along on the highway. Everywhere and everyone in New York, it seems, are grabbing and stabbing at immortality. Scratching names in cement as we did as kids on the street-corner sidewalks. Carve John, Jerry, Joe in brass. Or Alan, Dick, Ken, or Tommy drawn on a wall. It could last a day, week, or a whole month before, worn by footsteps, washed by rain, or faded by sunshine, another name or a new building comes to wipe it away. But ole Dru’s name, out of the sunshine, away from the rain, is writ in brass on a pew in the cloistered elegance of St. Bartholomew’s Church. Which still adorns there so peacefully on Park Avenue. Attesting to religion, wealth, and power. And permitting pure beauty and sentiment to pervade the spirit. The pocked-marked-faced girl who tried not to ridicule her fat-bellied clients said once to me to always tell everyone how great and wonderful they are, in case they ever get that way. And then you’d be telling the truth. And better late than never.
The massively heavy limousine with its clunking doors pulled up again at the Yiddish Theatre. Under the lights of the marquee, we step out. Dru handing the chauffeur an envelope. And judging by his friendly voice, it could contain a lot of money and he could be a hick hayseed in search of his fortune and blown in from the West. Or maybe one of the more pleasantly pastoral people you’d find up a gulch in West Virginia, where rougher cousins might, if you trespassed on their land, or looked at them sideways, stick a shotgun up your ass and blow your bowels out.
“Thank you kindly, Mrs. Wilmington.”
Diamond bracelets sliding back on Dru’s wrist as she waved down a taxi. To take me speeding along Central Park South. And this part of town makes me wonder how is old Max, who could always make one quietly chuckle at his dilemmas and the meticulous ways in which he oriented his life. And to recall his description, for which I must write a musical score to dramatize marching a naked football player out of his Houston house and down the elegant rich suburban public street and to which the national anthem of Texas can be sung.
Son of a bitch
I’m going to make you pay
The eyes of Texas are upon you
All the live long day.
As now we turn into the winding roadway north through the park. Evening light descends through the tree branches and over the stone outcroppings. Dru lowers a window. A faint roar of a lion comes out of the zoo. A horse and rider cantering along a bridle path. And into this sylvan peace at night come marauders who will stalk the honest citizen who now hurries heading for peaceful safety outside the park. While we go uptown on Fifth and crosstown on Eighty-sixth Street.
“Stephen, you must know Yorkville. Plenty of Germans, beer, plenty bratwurst, plenty sauerkraut.”
“Yes ma’am. Plenty Czechs, plenty Slovaks, and plenty Hungarians.”
Near the East River and the peace and quiet of another park, taxi stops. A large town house behind tall railings. Gray stone facings. Gargoyles. A gleaming black anonymous door. The shaming embarrassment of waiting for Dru to pay. Whose terror is to spend a dollar. Tips the driver. Might have given him a quarter. And I haven’t got much more than that left in the world. Watch her legs. Which go curvaciously every year to Colorado or even to Europe to ski down some Swiss mountain. With the wonderful sure movements of her finely boned hands takes a key from her purse and unlocks the heavy barred gate. Her easy steps up to the door. Another key opens it into a spacious black-and-white marble-tiled entrance hall, across which we could waltz together. Stone busts on plinths and in niches. Commemorating guys bound to be big-time but not one single composer or face familiar enough that I can recognize. As I follow this lady up this sweep of curving staircase. Who speaks back over her shoulder.
“Stephen, when you fell asleep in the car on the way to Valhalla, I wanted to wake you up to see the quite beautiful sweeping massiveness of the Kensico Dam but you were so deeply, somnambulantly talking in your slumber.”
“Was I.”
“And I did think I had better not interrupt you. That’s how considerate I can be.”
“What was I saying.”
“Of what little I could understand, nothing incriminating. You were saying, ‘Wrong, wrong. Wrong information is being given out at Princeton.’”
“Was I saying that.”
“Yes you were. Not something the college authorities would like said.”
“Well, I think it could refer to a bus timetable.”
“Ah, but at last some color seems to be coming back into your face. You were so pale. And I know everything is going to be all right with your work. And also your whole future.”
“I hope so. So many would wish me ill and would stand in my way and let me down. Things seem to insist to happen that seem to hinder me in my aspirations and effort to achieve my goal which is to create and conduct.”
“Dearest — I may, mayn’t I, call you that. Especially as you can’t seem to always remember to call me Dru. It’s all these old fogies sitting on their laurels and coasting on their reputations who should perhaps with the kindliness of time be swept away into the luxury of their retirement homes, there to comfortably await their secure niches in the history books.”