Orfeo Read Free Page A

care about being caught. He’s doomed already, anyway. The Reds had exploded an A-bomb weeks before, and Karl Els has told the assembled fathers of the neighborhood, over ribs barbequed in an enormous pit, that the planet has another five years, tops. The cookout is the neighborhood’s last hurrah. With the ribs gone, all those condemned fathers and their wives gather around the Els Hammond chord organ, a gin glass in every other hand, a chorus of sloshed innocents singing goodbye. They sing:
There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s Stream,
and the nightingale sings ’round it all the day long.
     
    Big brother Paul is asleep in the attic bedroom, one story above. Susan frets in her crib at the foot of the stairs. And Peter stands in the surge of these chords, listening to America’s farewell song. The notes float and rise. They turn speech as pointless as a radio ventriloquist. Light and darkness splash over Peter at each chord change, thrill with no middleman. The pitches topple forward; they fall beat by beat into their followers, obeying an inner logic, dark and beautiful.
    Another milky, troubled chord twists the boy’s belly. Several promising paths lead forward into unknown notes. But of all possible branches, the melody goes strange. One surprise leap prickles Peter’s skin. Welts bloom on his forearms. His tiny manhood stiffens with inchoate desire.
    The drunken angel band sets out on a harder song. These new chords are like the woods on the hill near Peter’s grandmother’s, where his father once took them sledding. Step by step the singers stumble forward into a thicket of tangled harmonies.
    Something reaches out and trips the tune. His mother’s fingers lose their way. She stabs at several keys, all of them wrong. The gin-waving singers tumble laughing into a ditch. Then, from his hiding place, the pajama-boy sings out the pitches of the lost chord. The ensemble turns to face the intruder. They’ll punish him now, for breaking more rules than anyone can count.
    His mother tries the suggested chord. It’s startling but obvious—better than the one she was searching for. The gin-soaked singers cheer the child. Peter’s father crosses the room and nips him on the rump, sends him back up to bed with a suspended sentence. And don’t come back down unless we need you again!
    TWO MONTHS LATER, young Peter stands clutching his clarinet in the wings at his first citywide competition. Every pleasure, he has already learned, must turn into a contest. His mother wants to spare him the gladiator ritual. But his father, who—so claims brother Paul—killed a German rifleman in the war, declares that the best way to protect a boy from public judgment is to subject him to heavy doses.
    Someone calls Peter’s name. He stumbles onstage, his head full of helium. Bowing to the room of utter blackness, he loses his balance and staggers forward. The full house laughs. He sits down to play his piece, Schumann’s “Of Strange Lands and People.” His accompanist waits for a nod, but Peter can’t remember how the tune starts. His arms ooze jelly. Somehow his hands remember the way. He blows through the piece too fast, too loud, and by the time he finishes he’s in tears. The applause is his cue to run offstage, humiliated.
    He ends up in the bathroom, puking his guts into the toilet. Vomit flecks his clip-on bow tie when he comes out to face his mother. She wraps his head into her breastbone and says, Petey. You don’t have to do this anymore .
    He pulls free of her, horrified. You don’t understand . I have to play .
    He wins second prize in his age group—a pewter G clef that his parents put on the mantelpiece next to his brother’s 1948 little league Division B fielding trophy. Three decades later, the thing will turn up wrapped in newspaper in his mother’s attic, a year after her death.
I’d been hearing that tune for sixty years. Musical taste changes so little. The sound of late childhood plays at our