to death. Nanny taught music in the Boston public schools until her retirement, when she moved to a farm on the South Shore. Here she raised bees and mushrooms, and read musical scores?Puccini, Mozart, Debussy, Brahms, etc.?that were mailed to her by a friend in the public library. I remember her very pleasantly. She looked, as I’ve said, like a Natick Indian. Her nose was beaked, and when she went to the beehives she covered herself with cheesecloth and sang Vissi d’arte. I once overheard someone say that she was drunk a good deal of the time, but I don’t believe it. She stayed with Percy when the winter weather was bad, and she always traveled with a set of the Britannica, which was set up in the dining room behind her chair to settle disputes.
The meals at Percy’s were very heavy. When the wind blew, the fireplaces smoked. Leaves and rain fell outside the windows. By the time we retired to the dark living room, we were all uncomfortable. Lovell would then be asked to play. The first notes of the Beethoven sonata would transform that dark, close, malodorous room into a landscape of extraordinary beauty. A cottage stood in some green fields near a river. A woman with flaxen hair stepped out of the door and dried her hands on an apron. She called her lover. She called and called, but something was wrong. A storm was approaching. The river would flood. The bridge would be washed away. The bass was massive, gloomy, and prophetic. Beware, beware! Traffic casualties were unprecedented. Storms lashed the west coast of Florida. Pittsburgh was paralyzed by a blackout. Famine gripped Philadelphia, and there was no hope for anyone. Then the lyric treble sang a long song about love and beauty. When this was done, down came the bass again, fortified by more bad news reports. The storm was traveling north through Georgia and Virginia. Traffic casualties were mounting. There was cholera in Nebraska. The Mississippi was over its banks. A live volcano had erupted in the Appalachians. Alas, alas! The treble resumed its part of the argument, persuasive, hopeful, purer than any human voice I had ever heard. Then the two voices began their counterpoint, and on it went to the end.
One afternoon, when the music was finished, Lovell, Uncle Abbott, and I got into the car and drove into the Dorchester slums. It was in the early winter, already dark and rainy, and the rains of Boston fell with great authority. He parked the car in front of a frame tenement and said that he was going to see a patient.
“You think he’s going to see a patient?” Lovell asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“He’s going to see his girl friend,” Lovell said. Then he began to cry.
I didn’t like him. I had no sympathy to give him. I only wished that I had more seemly relations. He dried his tears, and we sat there without speaking until Uncle Abbott returned, whistling, contented, and smelling of perfume. He took us to a drugstore for some ice cream, and then we went back to the house, where Percy was opening the living-room windows to let in some air. She seemed tired but still high-spirited, although I suppose that she and everyone else in the room knew what Abbott had been up to. It was time for us to go home.
Lovell entered the Eastman Conservatory when he was fifteen, and performed the Beethoven G- Major Concerto with the Boston orchestra the year he graduated. Having been drilled never to mention money, it seems strange that I should recall the financial details of his debut. His tails cost one hundred dollars, his coach charged five hundred, and the orchestra paid him three hundred for two performances. The family was scattered throughout the hall, so we were unable to concentrate our excitement, but we were all terribly excited. After the concert we went to the green-room and drank champagne. Koussevitzky did not appear, but Burgin, the concertmaster, was there. The reviews in the Herald and the Transcript were fairly complimentary, but they both pointed out that Lovell’s playing lacked sentiment. That winter, Lovell and Percy went on a tour that took them as far west as Chicago, and something went wrong. They may, as travelers, have been bad company for one another; he may have had poor notices or small audiences; and while nothing was ever said, I recall that the tour was not triumphant. When they returned, Percy sold a piece of property that adjoined the house and went to Europe for the summer. Lovell could surely have supported himself as a musician, but instead he took a job as a manual laborer for some electrical-instrument company. He came to see us before Percy returned, and told me what had been happening that summer.
“Daddy didn’t spend much time around the house after Mother went away,” he said, “and I was alone most evenings. I used to get my own supper, and I spent a lot of time at the movies. I used to try and pick up girls, but I’m skinny and I don’t have much self-confidence. Well, one Sunday I drove down to this beach in the old Buick. Daddy let me have the old Buick. I saw this very fat couple with a young daughter. They looked lonely. Mrs. Hirshman is very fat, and she makes herself up like a clown, and she has a little dog. There is a kind of fat woman who always has a little dog. So then I said something about how I loved dogs, and they seemed happy to talk with me, and then I ran into the waves and showed off my crawl and came back and sat with them. They were Germans, and they had a funny accent, and I think their funny English and their fatness made them lonely. Well, their daughter was named Donna-Mae, and she was all wrapped up in a bathrobe, and she had on a hat, and they told me she had such fair skin she had to keep out of the sun. Then they told me she had beautiful hair, and she took off her hat, and I saw her hair for the first time. It was beautiful. It was the color of honey and very long, and her skin was pearly. You could see that the sun would burn it. So we talked, and I got some hot dogs and tonic, and took Donna-Mae for a walk up the beach, and I was very happy. Then, when the day was over, I offered to drive them home?they’d come to the beach in a bus?and they said they’d like a ride if I’d promise to have supper with them. They lived in a sort of a slum, and he was a house painter. Their house was behind another house. Mrs. Hirshman said while she cooked supper why didn’t I wash Donna-Mae off with the hose? I remember this very clearly, because it’s when I fell in love. She put on her bathing suit again, and I put on my bathing suit, and I sprayed her very gently with the hose. She squealed a little, naturally, because the water was cold, and it was getting dark, and in the house next door someone was playing the Chopin C-Sharp-Minor, Opus 28. The piano was out of tune, and the person didn’t know how to play, but the music and the hose and Donna-Mae’s pearly skin and golden hair and the smells of supper from the kitchen and the twilight all seemed to be a kind of paradise. So I had supper with them and went home, and the next night I took Donna-Mae to the movies. Then I had supper with them again, and when I told Mrs. Hirshman that my mother was away and that I almost never saw my father, she said that they had a spare room and why didn’t I stay there? So the next night I packed some clothes and moved into their spare room, and I’ve been there ever since.”
It is unlikely that Percy would have written my mother after her return from Europe, and, had she written, the letter would have been destroyed, since that family had a crusading detestation of souvenirs. Letters, photographs, diplomas?anything that authenticated the past was always thrown into the fire. I think this was not, as they claimed, a dislike of clutter but a fear of death. To glance backward was to die, and they did not mean to leave a trace. There was no such letter, but had there been one it would, in the light of what I was told, have gone like this: DEAR POLLY: Lovell met me at the boat on Thursday. I bought him a Beethoven autograph in Rome, but before I had a chance to give it to him he announced that he was engaged to be married. He can’t afford to marry, of course, and when I asked him how he planned to support a family he said that he had a job with some electrical- instrument company. When I asked about his music he said he would keep it up in the evenings. I do not want to run his life and I want him to be happy but I could not forget the amount of money that has been poured into his musical education. I had looked forward to coming home and I was very upset to receive this news as soon as I got
