He lowers the needle. Technically speaking, this set just might be his favorite. And artistically it’s right up there. Cleveland plays gorgeous fortes, even when the first violin is sky-high. And they aren’t slaves to virtuosity, i.e., they don’t play the fast movements too fucking fast. The last of the lates, and almost the last thing Beethoven composed, Opus 135 is quieter than the others. To Vernon’s ears it has always sounded like the start of a new cycle that was cut short, rather than the end of this one. The calm before a new and unimaginable storm. Christ, what the world lost when he died. Or maybe that’s not the right way to think of it. Someone wrote somewhere—was it E. M. Forster?—“Great art doesn’t fill a need, it creates one. No one needed Beethoven’s Fifth until he wrote it. But once he wrote it, we couldn’t live without it.”
He listens. The insouciant Allegretto, built out of scraps. The playful Vivace, which is surely meant to sound like country fiddlers that never can quite get on the same beat. The Lento, simplest and most peaceful of all his slow movements. All this written by a tortured, dying man. Astonishing. And now the final movement, at the head of which Beethoven wrote what seemed to be a programmatic explanation: The Difficult Decision. Above the opening three-note phrase of the Grave, which rises anxiously, he wrote Must it be? And above the emphatic Allegro motif, which is the same phrase turned upside down, he wrote It must be! For years and years, Vernon took this as Beethoven’s anguished questioning of his mortality, followed by a profound acceptance, leading—so touchingly, so heroically—to joy. Then he read in The Beethoven Companion that it was all a joke, that some rich dumbass named Dembscher wanted to have the Opus 130 played at his house, but hadn’t subscribed to the piece’s premiere, so Beethoven refused to loan him the parts. When he asked through a friend what he might do to be forgiven, Beethoven responded that he could start by paying the goddamn subscription fee, which was fifty florins. Dembscher replied with such a miserable and weaselly “Must it be?” that Beethoven gleefully wrote a canon to the words, “It must be! Yes, yes, yes! Fork over the bucks! It must be!”
The recording ends. He slips the disk back into the sleeve. Is Gen back? Maybe he could help her put the groceries away. He turns out the desklight, heads up the stairs. He again considers calling Mark, but he still can’t think of a good reason. Maybe he could ask him about that second subject in the last movement, why it sounds so American. Mark always understood music better than Vernon. He tries not to regret that Mark became an astronomer rather than a concert pianist. Another contest Gen won, though he shouldn’t think of it that way.
At the top of the stairs, Vernon listens. “Gen?”
Silence.
He finds himself thinking for some unaccountable reason—maybe it was RCA’s red seal—of a naval rule he first learned in the service: Red, Right, Return. Meaning, when your ship is returning to port, keep the red buoy on your right. How clever, the person who devised that rule, with its alliterative mnemonic to help even the idiots. Vernon has always admired simple ingenuity more than he can ever get anybody else to understand.
• • •
Another evening. The autumn weather has turned cold. Vernon is going through the house closing storm windows. He can’t handle the leaves in the yard anymore. He used to rake them to the roadside and burn them. Mark loved watching that when he was little, jumping up and down and flapping his arms. Then the town outlawed burning, and it took a week to bag it all. Now a lawn company does it. Three or four young men that look Latino will arrive unannounced on a November day and clear the whole property in five hours.
A wet and windy night. The old sashes rattle, scaring Yolanda, who’s hiding under the living room couch. No idea where Llosa is, but Vargas is staying in Vernon’s vicinity. Gen is at Carlos’s apartment again. Seems the old rogue has a cold. She’s gone to brew him tea with lemon and honey, make him comfy, warm his ascot.
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep . . .
Vernon finds himself at the end of his circuit in the dining room they never use, where the old upright is. Mark used to practice for an hour before school, then another hour in the afternoon. What a diligent kid. Vernon sits at the piano. (She dotes on him—that ridiculous ascot.) He finally got around to learning a few weeks ago what a Neapolitan sixth was, so he picks out a C minor chord, then plays the N6, which is what steely-eyed music men call it. Beethoven inserted the Neapolitan sixth several times into the Moonlight Sonata, and when Vernon was listening to a performance by Claudio Arrau the other day, he actually managed to hear it. Which made him feel pretty good. Cat on his chest, Neapolitan sixth in his ear—the life!
Vernon depresses the keys of a C minor chord gently, so that the strings don’t sound. Then he whoops. The sound floating from the piano is a C minor chord. Magic. “Everything we do is music,” John Cage used to say. Now Vernon depresses the damper pedal, so that all the strings are free to vibrate, and barks, “Testing!” A recognizable ghost of his own particular vocal timbre rises from the casing. Is he just imagining it or, if he speaks a short word quickly enough, can he discern the actual word coming off the strings? “You!” he barks. “Me!” Nope, he’s imagining it.
Charles Ives loved his father. Alone among the unimaginative members of their family, he and George Ives were kindred spirits. Ives’s father was a Civil War trumpeter and afterward a town bandleader, and he lived
