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The Music Room

A Novel

Dennis McFarland

In the bicentennial year of our country’s independence from Great Britain, a time when I imagined the American masses celebrative and awash with a sense of history and continuity, my wife of only four years decided it would be best for both of us if she moved in with her mother for a while—a trial separation, she said, though we both were so immediately relieved by the idea of parting, the real thing was bound to endure. In October of the previous year, she had suffered her second miscarriage—this one quite far along (almost six months); we’d begun to breathe easy, we’d begun decorating a nursery—and afterward, we succumbed to a stubborn disappointment that refused forgiveness, refused sexual and emotional healing. There had never been anything in our marriage quite as coherent as this two-headed tragedy. Madeline left for Santa Rosa in February, a rainy, blossoming-of-spring month in northern California.

By the following August, I had decided to give up our large flat in San Francisco, where I remained, a rambling monk with only random visitation rights to my past. The place, the flat, was a daily encounter with guilt and failure, and though I knew enough not to believe in geographical cures for those conditions, that didn’t make me any less eager to escape its sinister Victorian charm. What Madeline didn’t have any use for in Santa Rosa I put into storage. I arranged for an absence from my record company, where things had long run better without me anyway. I thought I would travel for a few weeks, perhaps visit my brother in New York. I imagined that on my return I might find better, altogether different living quarters—a houseboat in Sausalito perhaps, a geodesic dome on Mount Tam.

My landlady had told me I should leave the flat “broom clean,” a task for which I’d kept a vacuum cleaner behind. In the unused nursery there were cobwebs, and on the walls and ceiling about a hundred self-adhesive stars and moons that glowed in the dark (better than any real starlit sky the night I brought my pregnant wife into the room and switched off the light to show her my handmade heaven). As I vacuumed away the cobwebs, I discovered that the little stars and moons had become dry over the months, and when I passed the vacuum across the surface of the wall, they let go easily. This was just the sort of thing I needed, the sort of thing I’d been needing for weeks. And as I stood there sucking the stars and moons from the nursery walls, and crying like a baby myself, the phone rang in the kitchen: a detective with the New York City police department’s homicide unit, informing me that early that morning my brother, Perry, had fallen to his death from the twenty-third floor of a midtown hotel, apparently a suicide.

Stupidly, I asked the man to hold the line for a moment. I returned to the nursery, then moved to the French windows that overlooked the garden. On the south fence, a hummingbird darted in and out of a passionflower vine, and in a distant window, across the length of two gardens, I could see a young nurse in white uniform and cap; I waved to her, but quite sensibly she didn’t wave back, and moved away out of sight. When I returned to the kitchen, I saw that the receiver of the cardinal-red telephone lay on the bare floor. I picked it up and spoke into it. I relied on extreme politeness to get through the rest of the conversation. I told the detective how very sorry I was to have kept him waiting and would he be kind enough to tell me his name again, his precinct, and yes, I would be coming to New York on the first flight, thanks very much for letting me know about my brother.

For a minute after hanging up, I wondered why Perry hadn’t thought of me. Not why hadn’t he thought of me as someone to turn to, but why hadn’t he chosen a better time to do himself in, a time when I didn’t already have troubles enough. And as punishment for this moment of weakness, I then recalled that Perry had left a message on my answering machine a few weeks earlier—nothing special, just hello, like to talk to you—and I’d never got around to returning the call. At that point I had made the decision to give up the flat, which was really a decision to overturn what I currently, loosely called my life, and Perry was not a soothing influence. I loved him, and I couldn’t have named some of the deep and thorough ways in which I depended on him, but he was not a soothing influence.

What immediately followed the New York detective’s phone call was a lot of practical arrangements—securing a flight and a hotel reservation, disposing of the vacuum cleaner, leaving the key to the flat with the landlady, dispensing with my car, turning off the telephone service, ordering transportation to the airport—and at some point during all this—maybe it was when I saw my two already-packed suitcases standing near the entry hall door—I thought, Sensible people don’t allow themselves ever to become this unmoored, they don’t allow themselves to reach so frayed a loose end. And why? Because it’s very likely that fate will rush in with some great calamity to give new purpose to your life. And for a while, as I sat in the smoky, upholstered cabin of a 747, flying toward the details of my only brother’s spattered remains on some grimy patch of pavement in New York City, I actually thought that perhaps I’d developed an interesting life view these last couple of hours. I drank two miniatures of Dewar’s Scotch on an empty stomach, and pictured Fate in the style of an editorial drawing—not as the name for what befalls you in life, but as a grisly beast with a thousand eyes, lurking behind a large rock or tree: the landscape is Western, arid (I’m not sure why); you pass by on an ambling horse; Fate, in his hiding place, waits for you to let go, even momentarily, of the reins. It wasn’t until we’d begun our descent into Kennedy that I understood what a crock all this thinking was, what a soft, mushy swamp I’d let my mind become lately—that primarily, at least, what had happened today had happened to Perry and not to me.

My flight had left San Francisco at eight-thirty in the evening, which put me into New York at the exotic hour of five in the morning. My cab driver was a black woman in her forties, six feet tall, dressed in a khaki jump suit, her straightened hair dyed orange and trained into a severe flip on one side. In a professional gospel singer’s voice, she sang a soulful “Bright Lights, Big City” on the way into town, and at first I thought she was putting me on, that the song was meant as counterpoint to the heaviness of her foot on the accelerator and the casual, abandoned way in which she frequently changed lanes. But something in her singing—probably simply how amazingly good it was—told me that she was listening to herself, that I wasn’t on her mind in the least.

On the metal frame encasing the Plexiglas protective barrier between us, someone, a former fare perhaps, had scratched into the black enamel, “Boys are my whole life.” I assumed this had been written by a teen-aged girl (though surely this was not necessarily the case), and I thought of Perry at fifteen, a precocious fifteen but fifteen all the same, and me, nineteen and home from my sophomore year of college.

It’s a moonless summer night on one of the Spring Lake beaches on the Jersey Shore. Somebody whose parents are in Europe for the month of August is having a big house party, one of those parties where the host, whoever he is, has invited his friends and told his friends to invite their friends, and so on. The resulting mixture of booze and partial anonymity has fallen like a gauze over everything at this late hour, and there’s something decidedly permissive in the sound of the surf and the wind. I haven’t seen Perry for a couple of hours, and Jeanine Clotfelter, my date for the party, has urged me a few times to go find him. I’m older and should be looking out for him. I tell Jeanine that she shouldn’t be such a worrier, it’s not good for her skin.

As someone throws more driftwood onto a huge bonfire on the beach, twisted screens of sparks fly up, are caught by the wind, and die. Someone plays white, city-kid blues on a guitar. Couples stroll away and are swallowed up by the blackness outside the circle of the fire. Couples return arm in arm. Small groups, mostly of boys, leave—somebody’s got dope—and return. Many of the girls and boys are darkly tanned. The sharp smells of the fire and of the sea air dominate, but underneath, there are the sweeter, more tribal odors of coconut oil, cocoa butter, baby oil and iodine.

Shortly after my remark about Jeanine Clotfelter’s skin, a younger girl, a Cindy somebody, shows up in the bright glow of the bonfire looking desperate, her cheeks streaked with tears. Jeanine, secretly happy to have arrived at some version of the melodrama she’s been imagining ever since Perry’s disappearance, finds Cindy’s arm and pulls her over to where we are sitting. Lassielike, Cindy manages to convey, not entirely verbally, that something terrible has happened, that we should follow her to the spot.

A half mile or so down the beach there’s an old abandoned dirt road with a washed-out bridge; it’s about an eight-or ten-foot drop down into a sand gully. Some of the wilder boys have been playing a little game, a daredevil’s delight, for which Perry has been kind enough to lend our father’s Lincoln. On our way to the abandoned road, Cindy explains—as best she can, for she’s still crying—the game. The player sits behind the steering wheel of the Lincoln from a starting place of about a hundred yards from the washed-out bridge; with the headlights on bright, the player drives toward the gully; at about fifty yards—indicated by a boy stationed by the edge of the road—the driver turns off the headlights and, in complete darkness, continues forward as far as he dares. Naturally, the one who gets closest to the gully, without driving into the gully, wins.

Cindy, frantic and hysterical, came running to fetch us just when Perry was taking the wheel. But when we arrive on the scene, the game has reached its end—apparently only a moment earlier. With its headlights turned back on, Father’s Lincoln squats like a big boat, no wheels visible, in the sand at the bottom of the gully; a great cloud of dust still rises and settles in the swathes of light in front of the car. The circle of boys surrounding the Lincoln is completely silent when we arrive, and they silently clear a path for us as we approach. When I lean down to look inside the window on the driver’s side, I see Perry—Perry, with a look of miraculous wonder on his face. What has happened has left him quite speechless. His silence, like the other boys’, is almost religious. He looks at me and smiles, shaking his head, his eyes wet with tears of joy. I say, “Jesus, are you in trouble now …”

Of course I have failed to understand the moment, the event, and Perry is cosmically disappointed. He continues shaking his head, but his expression has changed to disgust. Then he says, quietly, which was always his way, “At least I know what kind of trouble I’m in, Martin.”

Now, in the taxi, my recalling Perry’s young face, full of wonder, sent a brief but incisive jab of grief to my ribs, and my cab driver, as if she were tracking my thoughts, began to hum, a different song, a melody I didn’t recognize, something altogether too melancholy. It occurred to me to tell her that my brother had just jumped out of a hotel window. After all, I hadn’t said those words out loud yet, and it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to experiment; I suspected that as a cab driver in New York City she knew something of grief. We were just passing through the toll plaza outside the Midtown Tunnel, the sky had brightened enough to cast an ambiguous glow over everything—not day, not night—and the man who took the money, middle-aged with a droopy mustache and dark pouches beneath his eyes, looked sad and hopeless to me. One too many nights in the neon-lit toll booth.

I closed my eyes: the briefly pleasant, stinging scent of exhaust fumes; the underground roar, like entering the whirling channel inside a giant conch shell. When I opened my eyes maybe a minute later, the interior of the cab had taken on an unsettling domestic look, and in the artificial lights of the tunnel, I noticed that my driver, no longer singing or humming, was glancing at me occasionally in her rearview mirror. After another quick series of curious glances, she said, “If you’re cold back there, why don’t you roll up the window?”

As I cranked the window handle, which was missing its plastic knob, I realized that I was visibly shaking, which triggered my awareness of a string of neglected physical needs: freezing coldness, hunger, and a by now completely bewildered bladder. The tall black woman nodded approvingly. I thought, judging only from her eyes, that she was also smiling. I cleared my throat and said, “I’ve had to come here because my brother just died suddenly.”

“I beg your pardon?” she said, and I noticed that she had a surprisingly cultured note in her speech, as if she’d been trained in the theater.

“What a crying shame,” she said. Then she added, quite without astonishment, “I had a brother killed himself, too.”

Out of the tunnel—only a nod to any transition at best—we were suddenly aimed at the heart of Manhattan. “Wasn’t anything amazing about it,” my cab driver said, hanging a one-handed right turn that sent me teetering. “I expect just about anybody can blow their own brains out given the right circumstances—and the bottle and the gun.”

“I mean, isn’t it amazing that here I am all the way from California,” I said, “riding in the back seat of your cab, and we both have brothers who killed themselves.”

“Oh,” she said, as unimpressed as only someone shrugging such wide and bony shoulders could be. “Just goes to show you, I guess.”

She’d begun a lively game of dodge and dart up Park Avenue. There was a surprising amount of traffic at this hour and an assortment of drivers—a kind of estuary of the decadent and the ambitious.

Uptown, in the seventies, over to Fifth, down a couple of blocks, and we were stopped in front of my hotel. I had purposely avoided staying in midtown, frightened by the remote possibility of booking a room, by freakish coincidence, in the hotel. As I stood outside on the sidewalk, at the rear of the taxi, reaching into my pockets for cash, the cab driver retrieved my bags from the trunk and handed them over to a uniformed doorman. When she told me the amount of the fare, I paid it, along with a tip, and then said, “I thought the fare would be at least—”

“I turned off the meter when you told me about your brother,” she said, and as if I weren’t already surprised enough, she took both my hands into hers, which were huge and soft and warm.

In a moment, I would have to turn toward the hotel’s bright revolving doors at the end of a long arched canopy with brass poles and fittings, and toward an entirely stunned doorman; but just now, I was held firm in the grip of this unlikely navigator’s sympathy—her ridiculous orange hair now clearly a wig, she herself now clearly a drag queen. And it must have bolstered me, because after she drove away I was able to ask the waiting doorman, without a trace of embarrassment, to hurry please and show me to the nearest men’s room.

After a hot bath in a wonderful, cavernous old tub, I ordered room service. Knowing I should keep it simple, I asked for scrambled eggs and an English muffin, tea instead of coffee, no meat. But when it arrived, caddied by a cheerful young man who clicked his heels after he’d set everything out for my approval, it was not quite simple enough. Though I’m sure the eggs were perfectly fine, they looked like something that might have grown at the bottom of a fish tank. I quickly recovered everything as soon as the porter left the room.

Wearing a robe made of some unseemly shiny material, an anniversary present from Madeline—her favorite old actor was David Niven—I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the telephone. After a minute or two I went to the windows, which, at the back of the hotel, overlooked a jagged sea of rooftops. I drew the drapes, hoping to shut out the city at least temporarily, and returned to my thinker’s attitude on the edge of the bed: if there were a way to erase memory, to escape the resonant sway of the past, then calling my mother and telling her about Perry would be a simpler task. What I wanted was some way to unclutter the thing. I wanted it to be tidy, without echo. Already, as I imagined my mother’s voice, I was having to shake the absurd feeling that I was the tattletale, calling long distance to report Perry’s having been bad again. And in a vaguer sort of way, I felt some mysterious allegiance to Perry that excluded any grief sharing with our mother. I also needed very badly to sleep—I felt overwrought with fatigue rather than used up.

It was nearly eight o’clock, but I knew Mother to be an early riser these days. I put through the call to Norfolk, and Raymond, the aging houseboy, answered. “It’s Martin,” I said, and we exchanged a few banalities about how long it had been since my last visit and so on. He told me that Mother was already in the pool. “She’s a fanatic about her morning exercise, you know,” he said. “Hold on a second, Marty, and I’ll just take the phone out to her.”

I could hear the sounds of a television, a morning news program, then the yapping of the dogs, a screen door slamming, and Raymond again, calling to Mother. When she came on the line, Mother was using her expansive, outdoor voice. “Marty,” she said. “It’s so early for you.”

“Repeating everything back to me. I’m trying to tell you that Perry’s had an accident.”

“I don’t know any other way to do this,” I said, “except to say it, Mother. Perry’s dead.”

There was a brief silence, then the splash of water, then her voice, away from the phone now: “Raymond, honey, will you please hand me my robe?”

“Yes, Marty, I’m here. I’m just trying to catch my breath. What happened?”

“I only just got into a hotel,” I said. “I don’t have any details yet, but the police think Perry killed himself.”

Another silence. Then, “I’m all right, Marty, I’m all right. Tell me what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t really know anything yet,” I said. “I think the thing to do is just sit tight and I’ll keep in touch.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said after a moment. “Tell me what I should do.”

“A shock?” she said. “Is that what you call it? How did he do it? Jump out of a window or something? Something magnificent, surely …”

“Well, I’m not sure. I don’t have any idea why he did it, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“I’m not getting at anything, Mother. I just wondered whether or not you talked to him recently.”

“I think Raymond talked to him,” she said. “He called once when I was away, a couple of weeks ago. He talked to Raymond.”

“Well, let’s see,” she said. “I was in Palm Beach. That would have been about ten days ago, I guess. Oh, Jesus, why can’t I cry?”

“Of course,” she answered. “But you know Raymond’s memory isn’t what it used to be.”

“I’ve got people coming for lunch,” she said. “Raymond’s in the kitchen shelling shrimp.”

And then, after a pause, she said one word, flat, without inflection: “Perry.” After she’d hung up, I sat listening to the clinking chains and wind tunnels over the line, a primitive-sounding music that seemed to darken the already half-dark hotel room.

Perry and I are young boys, maybe nine and five, lying belly-down on the gentle slope of the front lawn to the Norfolk house. Once again nighttime, summer. We can hear music coming from Father’s old console radio in the library—Sinatra, something swingy. It’s the hour that lies between dinner and bedtime; the help (as we were taught to call them, never servants) are gathered in the kitchen drinking coffee and cleaning up the dinner mess; it is a blissful hour in which, for once, during a long day of grown-up guesswork and petulance, Perry and I are precisely what we most want to be—forgotten. It is our chance to observe unobserved, for us to spin out a commentary unchecked by adult censure. But now we are mute as we lie on the grass in the dark, watching the broad, glowing French windows of the library. Inside, our parents, Father in his dark suit and Mother in a long gown, are dancing, and though their laughter sails above and below the music, as they lose and regain their footing again and again, they look as if they are wrestling: Mother, whirling, collapses onto a sofa, Father jerks her erect, they both fall against a desk, sending a lamp crashing to the floor, and their immense shadows break across the library ceiling. It’s a spectacular thing, and vaguely frightening, and when I turn to Perry, I see no mixture of emotions on his face. He likes it very much.

When I was eleven years old, I described to my mother a distinct memory: I recalled a rather heavyset woman with jet-black hair and a deep voice who’d visited our house long ago. The three of us—the woman, my mother, and me—sat on a sofa of red leather with gold upholstery tacks. The two women talked for a while, then the woman with the black hair drove my mother and me to a train station. There was a good deal of train noise and train station noise; we stood on a concrete platform. Soon, a man wearing a white sailor’s uniform, the uniform of the United States Navy, walked briskly toward us. It was my father, young and handsome, wearing shiny black shoes whose sharp sound against the platform gave authority to his stride. He embraced us, and for a moment I thought I would be crushed to death.

That was all. The points on the star of this recollection were the red leather of the sofa, its bright gold buttons, the sound of my father’s shoes, his approach in uniform, and the brief, biting taste of suffocation. The day I told her of this memory, my mother was astounded, for I had recounted in some detail the night she was driven to the Norfolk train station to meet my father after he was discharged from the Navy. It was August of 1946. She was pregnant at the time—I would not be born for another month and a half.

Apart from that one apparently prenatal memory, it seemed to me, for much of my adult life, that my childhood did not begin until Perry was born. He was born on my own birthday, October 17, the year I turned four, and for me, his arrival was forever linked with early, vivid impressions of autumn: my parents languid on a bright yellow quilt, my father’s brilliant red sweater; Perry wrapped in a cotton blanket, asleep, blessedly quiet in the curve of Mother’s body; a pile of brown and gold leaves kicked together by my father, their decaying aroma and that of the still-green grass beneath; blizzards of leaves and whirlwinds of leaves in the streets; something more liquid about the light after the stark, straightforward sun of summer; and my parents’ heads so frequently bowed, as if in prayer, toward the swaddled thing called my brother. I was an octopus that Halloween, additional appendages fashioned out of old stockings stuffed with cotton by Mrs. Berend, Mother’s seamstress, and attached like oblong weights to my shoulders.

My jealousy and the stunts I pulled, driven by it, were standard—almost as if I were merely playing the juvenile role in some ancient and universal myth. The difference, perhaps, was in my motivation, my subtext. I was not reacting to any shift in focus on my parents’ part, away from me and onto Perry; I had been farmed out, long ago, to the attentions of my nurse, Marion, a pretty, middle-aged unmarried woman who was dumbstruck on many occasions by her powerful affection for my mother. So while I was spared the trauma of having something that belonged to me taken away and given to someone else, I was driven by the more sophisticated pain of watching this new baby get something I hadn’t even known I wanted: it seemed to me that Perry was receiving a kind of study and mindfulness that had never been mine.

But my parents went through most things quickly, and the flurry of their enthusiasm over the baby peaked that year precisely on Christmas Eve: an extravaganza that, though it was held at our house just outside Norfolk, might have been designed and executed by the staff of a lavish hotel. There was an ice sculpture, as I recall, an elaborate life-sized crèche, melting under floodlights on the front lawn. Perry was on display, too, suited up in a Santa’s elf costume, carried periodically among the festivities and passed around, even nibbled, like an unwieldy hors d’oeuvre. I remember vividly the little frenetic dance the adults did—the baby coming at them—as they agitated right and left in search of a place to put down a glass of champagne or a cigarette in order to free both hands; and the little cooing, surprised song that accompanied these gestures.

Christmas morning was a terrifying free fall back to earth. Perry, his eyes sunken and gray, was dehydrated, diarrheic, running a high fever, and we were without any help. (Mother, hysterical on the telephone to Marion, to the cook, to the pediatrician: “I don’t give a damn if it’s the fucking Second Coming, you’ve got to get over here now!”) Father booked us a suite in the Fontainebleau downtown, where we could all be looked after properly. A doctor and a nurse were found for Perry, and my parents and I had Christmas dinner in the Egyptian-style, marble-columned restaurant downstairs—traditional stuffed turkey served in Cleopatra’s palace on the Nile.

Perry recovered without any complications from what turned out to be a severe intestinal infection, and the following March, Mother and Father, leaving us in the care of Marion and the other help, departed for an extended stay overseas. That particular party, having begun no more than five months before, was over.

In 1951, my parents were still riding the high gay wave of their alcoholism. After Europe, it carried them to Africa, to India, and back to England. I saved the postcards—with the colorful, exotic stamps—that marked the safaris, the elephant and camel rides, the capitals, ports, and hamlets of that almost year-long binge. And by the time our parents were beached grandly on our doorstep again, two things had happened: having turned five, I had planted a weed of independence that would choke out any garden of love they might have had in mind for me on their gift-laden return; and, bereft of any other suggestions for where my energies should go, I had been turned by Marion into a little nurse’s helper—judicious, prudent, attentive to Perry’s welfare.

A sunny afternoon in September. My first day of first grade at a private school within walking distance of our house. Happily, I discovered that I could read better than most of the other first graders, though I didn’t quite catch on to the fact that I was supposed to follow along in my own primer when other pupils were reading aloud. (I thought that after a turn at reading aloud, I could stare lazily out the window with the primer closed.) But all in all, I liked my first day at school, and walking home—it is a warm, clear afternoon—I like thinking of the seemingly endless string of such days in store for me. When I arrive at the house, Father is at the grand piano in what we call the music room, a sitting room with Father’s piano in it.

The room is decorated in a tropical motif—rattan furniture, bamboo shades, straw mats—and cluttered with many savage-looking knickknacks; on a wall behind the piano hangs a painting of Father as a curly-headed boy, in which he strokes the fur of a huge Saint Bernard. Marion is seated on one of the couches, facing the piano, holding Perry in her lap—clearly against Perry’s will, which is considerable now that he is nearly two. In addition to quite a bit of English, Perry has acquired a repertoire of grunts and squeals that sound as if they come straight from a medieval torture chamber. He rehearses a number of these as he writhes and fidgets and strains in Marion’s lap.

Father, with a whisky just to the right of the music stand, is giving a piano recital, annihilating a Beethoven sonata, making slush of passage work and banging out chord clusters (instead of the written chords) in the melodramatic manner of a very large-scale loser. When Perry sees me, he wrestles free of Marion and runs toward me, shrieking; as Marion lunges for him, he stumbles, his chin connecting audibly with the hardwood floor. Father’s piano stops abruptly, and somehow he manages to upset the tumbler of whisky, which crashes to the floor and explodes in a starburst of glass splinters. Father curses, Marion calls out a warning about the broken glass, Perry screams at a pitch that could open graves—a pitch reserved for serious pain—and from somewhere upstairs Mother’s voice cries, “What was that? For God’s sake, what’s happened?” Though it is not yet three in the afternoon, she has already begun the extensive ritual that will culminate in whatever plans she and Father have for dinner that evening, and when she appears in the doorway of the music room, she is wearing a lavender dressing gown and an abundance of fragrance. Marion has got Perry into an upright position, and then there is this moment—the sound of Father’s piano still ringing in our ears, the room reeking of perfume and whisky—this moment in which everyone in our family converges on Perry, and we partake in a small struggle for actual possession of him: a confusion of hands, a repetition of the word “come,” I hear my own voice saying, “Let him go!” and Perry is in my arms—I am running with him out of the room, out the front door, and down the lawn toward the line of dark cypress trees that signals the beginning of our neighbor’s horse farm and the end of our yard, the end of our parents’ property.

Our great-great-grandfather on our father’s side was Pietro Lamberti, the popular Venetian tenor, a contemporary of Verdi’s, and many tales were handed down through the generations about Lamberti’s having spent a good deal of time on Verdi’s farm near Busseto. (The implication of these tales, the implication of their persistence, seemed to be that somehow Lamberti would have been a better tenor, or that his life would have been more significant, if he had actually dug potatoes in Verdi’s fields, but no historical evidence of any such weekends in the country has ever been found.) One of Lamberti’s sons, Fortunino (a middle name of Verdi’s), was a minor composer of opera buffa, and another, our great-grandfather, was a violinist. There were musicians in each generation; Peter Lambert, our grandfather, who emigrated to the United States as a child, became a concert pianist, not well known outside his home state of Virginia. But the family’s musical fame hit its peak back in the nineteenth century. Some would say that any remnant of a true musical life was lost when my father impulsively wedded my mother, a singer and chorus girl he met at a Las Vegas craps table in May of 1945.

It was a time of celebration, both national (Hitler had just killed himself) and personal (my father’s naval squadron was not being sent to Okinawa). My father was spending one night of his leave in Las Vegas, on his way home to Virginia from San Diego, where he was stationed. He took my mother home with him to Norfolk and astonished her with his wealth. They were married during that same leave, Mother was set up, rather surreptitiously, in a room of our grandparents’ house, and Father returned to see out the rest of his service in the Navy.

Perry and I never knew our grandparents. All the money came from our grandmother, Elizabeth Stanard, Peter Lambert’s second wife, a pretty Virginian debutante whose coal and Bright Leaf tobacco assets alone—this was in 1923, when she was only twenty-one—were valued at something like fifteen million dollars. Peter and Elizabeth Lambert were killed in 1948 when Peter, by then an old man, flew their Piper Cub into the sheer side of a mountain in Colorado. I was only two, and I have no memory of them, though there seemed always to be something vaguely familiar about their aristocratic faces in photographs; Perry, of course, had not been born. And Mother never revealed much about her own family. She had no brothers and sisters, and her parents were always disposed of with one word: dead.

Before Elizabeth Stanard Lambert died, she tried making the best of an awkward situation by teaching Mother everything she could about clothes and food. Though Mother no doubt benefited from this instruction, she never quite lost her own style—you could always detect hints of Las Vegas in anything she did. She wasn’t all feather boas and sequins, that’s not what I mean, but her jewelry was too big and the colors she chose were noticeably loud; mainly, her style, regardless of the context, was excessive. There was always too much jewelry, too much food, too much chintz, and of course, very soon, much too much booze.

Sometime shortly after Perry and I started school, Mother seemed to retire from society. She was simply drinking too much, and felt too rotten too often, to go anywhere or plan anything. For company, she had a couple of old drinking buddies: an obese woman named Felicia Snow, who had a black-dyed beehive and a voice rather like Popeye’s, only deeper, and a friend of Felicia’s, a very small homosexual man Father liked to refer to as Little Teddy. The three of them—Mother, Felicia, and Little Teddy—would spend long afternoons together in our house, playing backgammon and cards and getting what they called “house-drunk.” When Perry and I would arrive home from school, these three would be our playmates, if only for a few minutes—Perry and I were an interesting distraction to the adults, but a distraction that didn’t wear well.

Now that our parents’ glory years were over, and Mother had practically withdrawn from public, Father, already in his thirties, made one last attempt to pull his own life together: while Mother and her friends played backgammon and cards and got house-drunk in the library, Father practiced the piano. He was sober during this period, which didn’t sit well with Mother. Eventually, he rented a recital hall downtown and hired a publicist to advertise his debut. The performance was well attended, and was reasonably brief. He played a program of classical and romantic music: Schubert’s Sonata in A, Beethoven’s Waldstein, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, and Sonata in E-flat, no. 49, by Haydn. The recital received a good review in the Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star. And afterward, over the next eight years, Father, becoming quieter and kinder, gradually drank himself to death.

His beautiful, wealthy mother was only in her forties when she died, and he blamed his own father for the accident, claiming that the old man, in his seventies then, had no business flying a plane at his age. The accident became for Father the single explanation for all his own failures. That small plane smashing into a wall of rock somewhere in Colorado was, in Father’s blurred thinking, the basis of his own failed musical career and of his not finding anything else to do with himself. It was the basis of his severe depressions, of his string of DWI arrests, and of the sad, defeated thing that his marriage eventually became.

Perry, Mother, Mother’s friends Felicia and Teddy, and I are all in the library, which seems particularly moody this afternoon with rain blowing against the French windows. It’s 1957, the year Mother always called us “seven come eleven,” our ages. If there is a rare moment of quiet in the library, we can hear distantly, through closed doors, the sound of Father’s piano. Perry and I both know by heart all the music Father plays these days—we have heard the same four pieces over and over again.

At this particular moment, I am reclining on a couch in my sock feet, studying spiritlessly a picture in a puzzle book: you are supposed to find a bucket, a shovel, a light bulb, an inkwell, a teapot, and a parrot hidden in the complicated drawing. Perry is tending bar, pouring another Scotch for Felicia—the way he has to hold the bottle steady with two hands somehow makes him look drunk—and Felicia, at the card table with the others, is feigning a slap at the side of Teddy’s head, saying, in her barnacled voice, “Oh, you thing you!”

“Well, it’s true,” says Teddy, drawing deeply on a cigarette, executing a French inhale, then looking sidelong at Mother.

Mother, who is dealing cards, says, “Don’t look at me. I’m steering clear of this one.”

“And wise you are,” says Felicia. “It absolutely is not true and you know it.”

Perry arrives at Felicia’s elbow with the glass of Scotch. She takes it, sips, and sets it down, smiling at Perry, then goes on: “I don’t even like the man, the little peacock.”

She takes another sip of the Scotch, then notices that Perry hasn’t moved, is standing at her side, staring. “Well, what are you looking at,” she says, not harsh but mildly bemused.

“Yes, she did say peacock,” says Teddy. “I heard her, too. She’s a very silly woman.”

“Why did you say peacock?” Perry asks Felicia, not even acknowledging Teddy.

Silence for a moment, in which everyone apparently waits for Felicia’s answer. She looks at Mother and says, “Do I have to explain this?”

“I think you should, too,” says Teddy. “It’s the least you can do. He fixes your drink and serves it to you like some kind of little lackey … then you won’t even explain why you said peacock.”

Another moment of silence, during which the adults all look into one another’s eyes. Mother lights a cigarette and starts to giggle, then they all three erupt into gales of laughter.

Perry saunters over to where I am and leans against the arm of the couch. He looks at the picture in the book and points listlessly to the hidden light bulb. “There,” he says.

The rain whips the window glass in such a sharp staccato it makes me think of castanets.

Another of those afternoons in the library. Also autumn, also raining. Mother, Felicia, and Teddy are laughing raucously about some other thing. I am trying to show Perry how to make a cat’s cradle with a piece of string. Marion, our nurse, shows up at the door to the library beaming at Mother—apparently entranced by the sound of Mother’s laughter—and moves to the card table, where she begins clearing a packed ashtray.

“Oh, don’t do that, Marion,” Mother says, composing herself. “Raymond will take care of it when he brings our snack.”

Marion, hurt, abruptly serious, turns to Perry and me. “Well, boys,” she says, “what do you say we go out to the kitchen and see what Raymond has cooking for us?”

Neither Perry nor I respond. The adults at the table have resumed playing cards, and for a moment it’s as if Marion has stumbled into a dream in which she may look, but not touch. “Well, what do you say?” she says finally.

There is a rumble of thunder, after which Perry says, “I want to see Father.”

“I want to see him, too,” says Teddy with a pout in his voice. “We never get to see him anymore.”

“Yeah, me, too,” says Felicia. “I’m beginning to think he doesn’t like us.”

Mother looks up wide-eyed, as if she suddenly has a brilliant idea. “Well, all right,” she says, pouring down what’s left in the bottom of her glass, then planting the glass noisily on the table. “It would be kind of nice to see him, wouldn’t it?”

“He’s practicing,” I say from the couch. I cup my hand to my ear, demonstrating the obvious truth of what I’ve said.

“Marion,” says Mother, “will you please go tell Signore Rudolfo that we would all like to see him?” (Most people know Father as Rudy. Mother sometimes calls him Signore Rudolfo, an allusion to his Italian ancestry, and I can tell, though I wouldn’t be able to explain how, that there’s something unfriendly in it.)

A dilemma on Marion’s face—particularly one involving Mother—completely destroys her looks. “But Marty’s right, Helen,” she says faintly. “He is practicing.”

“I know he’s practicing,” Mother says. “It’s daytime, isn’t it? What else would he be doing?”

We are all silent for a minute, and it seems that everyone is listening to Father’s music, muted by the walls. He happens to be playing Schubert, an especially fiery passage, and Mother finally says, “Well, I’m not afraid of him,” and rises.

After Mother has left the room, Marion goes to Perry and, gently stroking his hair, says, “I really don’t think we should disturb him”—as if this drunken bee in Mother’s bonnet is Perry’s fault.

“Oh, don’t be such sticks-in-the-mud, you two,” Teddy says. “Marion and Martin. Two peas in a pod. You’re such an old man, Marty. And you, Marion, you’re such an old—”

Marion strides out of the room, past Teddy so briskly that I think I see his hair move. “Well, my, my,” he says. “I think I have offended our nurse.”

“God knows I could,” says Teddy, lighting a fresh cigarette. “I could use an entire intensive care unit, if the truth be told.”

Perhaps I am the only one who has noticed that the sound of Father’s piano has stopped. Not long afterward, Mother returns to the room and takes her seat at the card table. She sits with an exaggeratedly straight spine and closes her eyes, affecting serenity, then she turns to Perry and says, “Perry darling, why don’t you go tell Father that we all want desperately to see him in the library. Tell him we miss him.”

Mother glares at me, and Teddy, cocking his little head in the direction of the door, says, “Atta boy. Thank God one of you boys has some spunk in him.”

Perry has left by now, on his way to the music room. I start to leave the library as well. But Mother catches my sleeve as I pass the card table. “Stay, Marty,” she says. “Don’t go. Teddy’s sorry. Aren’t you, Teddy?”

“For what, pray tell?” Teddy says, placing three full whisky glasses—no ice—on the table.

“Teddy, what did you say?” Mother asks, sighing. “Why must you always insult people?”

“I didn’t say anything,” says Teddy. “And I didn’t insult her.” Then he chuckles and says, “She left the room before I had a chance to insult her. And anyway, all I was going to say was—”

Teddy interrupts himself in order to sip his drink, but Mother reaches for his glass, jerks it out of his hand, splashing whisky on the table and shocking Teddy and Felicia both. Holding the glass away from Teddy, she says, “It’s really very simple. If you are going to insult Marion, you’re not welcome in my home.”

Teddy stands as if to go, then sits again, twitters, and lights a cigarette. “Have it your way, Helen,” he says. “I didn’t know you felt so strongly.”

The Music Room

A Novel

Dennis McFarland

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