The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (30 page)

Promotion followed swiftly. In those days the gulf between the owners of the opera house, all New York businessmen, and the artists, already dominated by Germans and Wagnerites, was almost unbridgeable. Neither side could even listen to the other, and opera was produced in an atmosphere of what we would call a “cold war.” But Uncle Ed could talk to Mr. Morgan and to Mr. Damrosch and make each feel that he was on his side. When the general managership fell vacant in 1890, the board, after several long, wrangling sessions, was suddenly united by the prospect of this dark but very glossy horse.

There was an outburst of enthusiasm. What did it matter that Ed Stillman was not a musician? Was there not too much expertise already? Were the directors not sick of managers who swore guttural oaths and regarded “opera” and “Wagner” as synonyms? The only trouble seemed to be with Uncle Ed himself, who resisted the appointment with a stubbornness that surprised everybody, and, when at last prevailed upon, accepted it with a gravity of manner that seemed almost Teutonic. Had the directors paused, however, to remember how the miter had changed Thomas à Becket (which, needless to say, they did not), they might have consoled themselves with the thought that they were twelve King Henrys to his single archbishop.

One person who had no reservations over Uncle Ed's promotion was his sixteen-year-old niece. I was already a devoted opera fan, with a picture by my bedside of Melba, whose London debut as Lucia had been the great moment of my life. I attended the Brearley School, but books, and even, in holiday parties, boys, hardly existed for me. I lived for the afternoons and my singing teacher, Miss Angela Frith. Uncle Ed, whose courteous demeanor to the young raised them briefly to the paradise of adults, was already my favorite relative. Now he became a god.

Mother, who considered herself vastly more liberal than the Stillmans, was as one with them when it came to any serious extension of the arts beyond the parlor. She laughed at my musical pretensions, when she was not irritated by them.

“Why don't you take Amy to one of your rehearsals, Ed?” she asked my uncle one night. “I wonder if seeing the opera house in its shirtsleeves wouldn't cure some of her fancies?”

Poor Mother! If she only had known what oil she was pouring on my fire! I waited breathless for Uncle Ed's answer, afraid to ruin my chances by showing my enthusiasm, but his smile recognized my palpitations. He knew that waiting was torture to the young.

“Why, certainly, any rehearsal she wants. We're running through the second act of
Tristan
tomorrow afternoon. How will that do?”

And so, after a sleepless night and a morning at school in which I took in nothing, my dream came true. There was I, Amy Stillman, seated with my uncle in the center of the second row of the orchestra pit in the great dark, empty opera house before a stage covered with cartons and dirty canvases, watching two stout middle-aged persons, a man and a woman in modern dress, sitting side by side on a small wicker divan. And when the conductor raised his baton, and we started right off in the middle of the love duet, I thought it the most romantic setting that I had ever seen. So much for Mother's precautions!

I was familiar with
Lohengrin
and
Die Walküre
, but I had never heard a note of
Tristan
. Its effect on me was ambivalent. I was intrigued and excited by the violence and surge of the music, but at the same time it made me restless, apprehensive, almost afraid. Of what? Of love, of physical love? I have often asked myself since. But I do not think so. It was difficult for a girl in my time to associate love with the pordy middle age represented by the two performers. No, there was something else in that churning, seething music, something like being caught in the backwash of a big breaker when surf bathing in Southampton on a visit to Granny, tossed and pulled by the hissing water and borne out ineluctably to sea, to be smothered, perhaps to be drowned in a terrible peace beneath that tormented surface. I had no idea that this was a common reaction to
Tristan
, and I became at length so agitated that I was relieved when the music director called to the conductor through a little megaphone to stop the music.

The woman who was singing Brangäne had been delivering the offstage warning in a voice that was almost inaudible. She complained that the strain on her vocal cords was so great that she could not sing in full voice until the performance. It could be then or now, she concluded defiantly. The
Herr Direktor
could choose. The latter turned to Uncle Ed.

“Which shall it be, Mr. Stillman?”

“Tell her to sing today,” Uncle Ed snapped, and the rehearsal went on. Inexperienced as I was, I could sense that he had already taken hold of his company.

In a break, after the duet, Uncle Ed suggested a turn around the block. I was very proud to be on the arm of my handsome and distinguished uncle, and I admired the easy courtesy with which he raised his hat to any members of the company whom we passed, without interrupting the flow of our discussion. He asked me which I preferred,
Tristan
or
Lucia
, already knowing that
Lucia
was my favorite opera.

“Oh,
Lucia,”
I said promptly. “But
Tristan
is more interesting,” I added politely, suspecting his own preference.

“Interesting,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Perhaps that's just what it is. Look down Broadway, Amy.” We paused at the corner and gazed south at the great thoroughfare. “Look at all that gray dirtiness and listen to all that strident clamor and tell me if you really think our modern life corresponds to the tinkling tunefulness of Donizetti.”

“You believe it should?”

“Well, don't you think there should be
some
relation between daily life and music? Or do we go to the opera just to dress up and see our friends?”

“But Uncle Ed,” I protested earnestly, “shouldn't opera help us to forget all that dirt and clamor?”

“Spoken like a true boxholder! You'll be like the other dreamers in Number Seven, Amy. Your grandmother sighs for Edgar of Ravenswood, and even your Great-Aunt Rosalie wants to immolate herself with Rhadames in a living tomb!”

“And I can be Carmen!” I exclaimed, feeling very adult to be joking about such things (particularly Granny!) with the older generation.

“I'm sure a very proper Carmen,” Uncle Ed added with a chuckle. “Maybe even a rather severe one, like dear Lili Lehmann. She sings the ‘Habanera' as if it had been written by Haydn. I suppose, Amy, I sometimes feel that our life is such a continual fancy dress ball that I want—just for a minute, mind you, just every now and then—to slip into plain old clothes and be myself.”

As I took in with a quick glance my uncle's rich brown tweeds, the maroon polish of his shoes gleaming beneath his spats, the red carnation in his buttonhole, the walking stick with the silver knob, I could not but wonder if
these
were his plain old clothes. “Does your
Tristan
‘correspond' to modern life?” I asked timidly.

Uncle Ed became immediately serious at this, more so than I could ever remember having seen him. “That's a good question, Amy. No, Wagner's operas don't correspond to modern life because Wagner didn't believe in modern life. Not in ours, anyway. He thought that it didn't exist, or if it did, that it was too trivial, too unheroic, too sordid, to be worth commenting on in musical terms. If a man was to write opera, it should be about valiant mythological figures, gods and goddesses, and if there weren't any gods and goddesses, he ought to create them. Think of it, Amy!” Here Uncle Ed's eyes really sparkled. We stopped walking, and he spread one arm in a broad gesture. “Ever since Shakespeare we have taken for granted that the artist must deal with mortal men, that his province must lie in love and compassion. You remember what Pope said: the proper study of mankind is man. But Wagner did what nobody has done in the whole history of art, except perhaps the ancients. If he was compelled to comment, he would create a world worthy to comment upon. He despised mankind, but did that stop him? He saw that the only beautiful thing in the world was death, and he made love to it in
Tristan
. Oh, Amy, when once
you feel
Wagner, there is nobody else. There is nothing else.”

How vivid that moment is to me this day, more than sixty years after! For I saw things then that were beyond the comprehension of my years in a terrible flash of divination. It was not that I agreed with Uncle Ed. I didn't then, and, thank God, I do not now. But I
saw
, and the vision scared me. I saw into the awful emptiness of his soul, and I felt the well of pity bubbling up in my own. Because, you see, Mr. Styles, I felt that I had seen into something essential in the nature of my family, or at least of the Stillman side of it, something that Granny had all along suspected and that she fought blindly, without understanding. And this was it: Uncle Ed's elegance, his smartness, his whole air of exquisite maintenance, was the same gallant but essentially futile effort to decorate the void of God's or non-God's neglect that he fancied he could detect in the tumultuous creations of Wagner. It all had to end, as it ended in
Tristan
, in a death that one could only pretend was a love death.

My shudder was barely perceptible, but Uncle Ed perceived it. He shook his head, apologized for his theorizing (always, in his opinion, “bad form”) and led me back to the opera house. “If Granny Stillman hears I've been trying to convert you to Wagner, there'll be the devil to pay,” he said with a wink, as we took our seats. “If she asks you what was being rehearsed today, tell her it was
Les Huguenots
.”

***

Granny, of course, had not been born a Stillman, and she had none of their characteristics. She was a good deal tougher and less imaginative, and she was much more innately conservative. Where Father and Uncle Ed were by temperament aristocratic, she was bourgeois to the marrow of her bones. She had been widowed early in life and had managed her small inheritance so well that she was now able to maintain a house on Sixty-fifth Street and a shingle cottage in Southampton and to keep a butler and four maids. But always frugal, she depended on her richer sister for the luxuries of a carriage and opera box.

I look at Granny's photograph as I write, with the pale oval face, the high-piled, elaborately waved gray hair and the large, watery, apprehensive eyes, and I think how she would stare at the liberties I am taking with her! Yet I have started this thing, and I have to make her understandable. Granny believed in the present, the present instant, the concrete thing before her eyes. Having said she was bourgeois, I will now say that she had a bit of the peasant in her. She accepted the mores of her New York as if established by divine decree. When her favorite niece lay dying, we were all surprised that she seemed wholly concerned with whether or not to call off a dinner party. But this was not from lack of feeling. It was from a deep-seated belief that doing the “right thing” was paramount to personal grief, and it gave an oddly impersonal quality to her snobbishness. She never scorned outcasts, any more than, conventionally anti-Semitic and anti-Roman, she in the least disliked or disapproved of Jews and Catholics. She simply would not pick her friends among them.

I believe that Granny loved Uncle Ed more than she had ever loved another human being (unless it was the rather shadowy figure of my long-dead grandfather), but when rumors began to circulate that he had “gone over to the Germans” and even that he had “betrayed his trust,” she found herself in an acutely painful position. She and her sister, Aunt Rosalie Belknap, were close with the peculiar closeness of their generation of siblings: they lived on the same street in Manhattan and on the same sand dune in Southampton and saw each other every day of the year. Aunt Rosalie, being older and cleverer and a great deal richer, dominated Granny, while Uncle Harry, who took care of her business interests, represented “men” in her respectful widow's heart. If the Belknaps were against the “new music,” how could a Stillman be for it? How much less could a Stillman be for it who owed his very job to Uncle Harry?

Matters came to a head on the Sunday after that rehearsal, at Granny's family lunch. As in other brownstones of that period, the dining room was the one handsome chamber, always on the first floor back, shrouded in kindly darkness, high-ceilinged, with perfectly polished silver gleaming in crowded density on the sideboard and with high, carved Jacobean chairs looking like antiques under the crystal chandelier. When I inherited Granny's and put them in a good light, they showed up as bad fakes.

Aunt Rosalie, as was to be expected, led off the discussion. To tell the truth, I always found Aunt Rosalie, who dyed her hair a jet black and wore too many rings and bracelets, the least bit common, whereas Granny, even at her most worldly, was always totally a lady. Money sometimes had that effect on old New York. Granny may have owed her relative refinement to her relative poverty.

“They tell me young Damrosch is twisting you around his little finger, Ed,” Aunt Rosalie began. “They say we're going to have nothing but darkened stages with earth goddesses moaning about time and fate.”