The Salieri Effect: Installment #7

The 3rd Chapter began with Cameron having a breakfast emergency as Kerr and Tom get ready to face the day. Tom has been telling them about the Standing Stones, part of an old stone circle just up the path through the woods, which they're getting ready to go see. Meanwhile, Tom shows Kerr an old box he'd found in one of the bedroom closets but couldn't figure out where music manuscripts might've come from, at least in this family. He unfolds a letter dated 1908 and signed Emaline Norton Hyde.

= = = = = = =

[Chapter 3, continued...]

I could hear Cameron was already done in the shower. “Next,” he'd called down, and padded back into the 1951 bedroom.

Emaline Norton Hyde!

Suddenly, it was as if I'd stepped into the lobby of Sanders Theater at Harvard in 1886, before checking to make sure I was still with Tom in his dining room.

“Apparently,” Tom said, unaware of my momentary lapse in focus, “Old Cousin Emaline's husband was a composer – and Emaline as well!”

“Ah...” I looked over his shoulder cautiously, afraid to touch anything for fear of being transported, hoping to avoid any of the weirdness that had happened at his old place last fall. “I see...”

Could I end up back at Harvard or somewhere else in Emaline Norton's life, perhaps here in the cabin in 1908, the way touching Tom's ballerina figurine dropped me off at Faber in 1973? I'd met “Cousin Emaline” once before, and didn't need to run into Jeckelson Hyde again (“so, they had gotten married, then...?”).

There had been a concert. The Kapellmeister, a shady character, had dragged me with him back in time some 130 years, where I met John Knowles Paine, Emaline Norton and the arrogant Master Hyde. The Kapellmeister wanted to find something called the Belcher Codex which Paine had located in Germany and kept in Harvard's library. Many details of similar experiences in his quest – there were at least three, maybe four – remained vague in my mind, but every now and then I'd unexpectedly receive a glimmer of a memory.

Miss Emaline was one of those rare females studying in conjunction with Harvard, not officially enrolled (that wasn't permitted until later), and even more controversial was her studying “music composition” with John Knowles Paine. Men, convinced women weren't intelligent enough to study at a university, wondered what she was doing wanting to become a composer?

Paine had pointed out another student, the strikingly handsome but egotistical Jeckelson Hyde who seemed enamored of Miss Norton's beauty and was determined, despite her indifference to him physically and musically, to marry her.

Hyde attacked us in the library that night, missing me by inches and plummeting over the railing to the floor below. In the briefest flash beforehand, I'd caught a glimpse of his signet ring. The Kapellmeister, whisking me away in time, never explained what exactly the symbol on that ring meant – most likely something evil.

“Since my husband's recent death,” Tom read, “no longer gives him authority over who I am or what I can and cannot do, I thought to resume composing music again as I'd done before our marriage, something he had forced me to set aside to be more wifely to him and administer to his needs. Jack Hyde had become a bitterly defeated man bound to a wheelchair existence and was no longer able to compose, himself. Therefore he would not permit me to do what he no longer could.”

The letter continued in its beautiful copperplate calligraphy, how she began with a few short piano pieces and simple parlor songs, such as she could perform herself for her family at their summer gatherings.

“But they were not very appreciative, so I'll store them in this box, hidden until some time they could be heard.”

She had included some of her husband's works with a separate note: “Many of Jack's better pieces would never find approval. I find them abhorrent, so much like the man, their style discordantly experimental.”

“And Terry, check out this cello sonata,” Tom said, “it looks terrific, quite a substantial piece – there's a note with it.”

She said “it gave me great pleasure, writing this, knowing Jack, even before the accident, would never have been able to play it, which would have aggravated him into even greater, more unnatural furies.”

“'Unnatural furies'? Jack Hyde must've been quite a piece of work,” Tom said. “Maybe the family stories were true, about their unhappy marriage, especially since Jack was confined to a wheelchair all his life.”

I'd decided to risk picking up a couple pages, relieved to find myself still standing in place, firmly in the present.

“Not all his life,” I said, dismissively. “That fall in the library probably crippled him for the rest of his life.” I could still hear him scream, sweeping past, falling, one more half-forgotten memory.

Over by the punchbowl, I'd overheard his friends joking the only way he'd ever get any recognition is if he could convince Miss Norton to marry him and publish her music under his name. He'd also made some particularly disparaging comments about women, female composers especially, ideas still being argued about too many generations later.

Holding up one of Hyde's experimental piano pieces, I thought this was quite fascinating for an American writing in the 1880s. “Paine thought this 'crazy stuff' he'd written was by a completely different person. Everything brought into his lessons was salon music – said he had lots of confidence but no talent. Oh, look at this...”

A folded, once crumpled piece of paper fell out, tucked between the pages, in what was presumably Hyde's cramped, spidery handwriting. It looked like shorthand for a sketch, something called “Minotaur's Gate,” dated 1892.

“That's what Cousin Emaline says in this other note.” Tom continued reading aloud:

“'Dr. Paine felt most of what he showed him was poor and derivative, but I thought them the worst of amateurishness. These other pieces, his darker side, were wild and brilliant, inspired by Liszt, he'd said, but formless and lacking in cohesion.'

“And yet she kept them – the darker ones – rather than destroy them all. I think I would've had a great bonfire.”

“Maybe she did, with his more conventional ones – maybe even before he'd died.”

“Wait a minute...” Tom stopped and turned to look at me, brow furrowed. “How do you know all this stuff – about their studying with Paine, about Hyde's musical personalities, and especially about his fall?”

“Uhm...” It's not like I could've read it in some dusty journal. Judging from this box, who would've known about them?

In that split second, trying to come up with some excuse less lame than “hadn't you mentioned them before – last night?”, or less truthful than “I'd met them when I visited Harvard in 1886,” I realized Tom Purdue, a friend I've known for almost forty-five years, is related to Supply Belcher, the “Handel of Maine”! Through his mother's “New England Stock,” Tom was somehow a distant cousin of Burt Norton who'd owned this cabin, and a distant cousin of Emaline Norton whose great-great-grandfather was the early-American composer, Supply Belcher.

As if the genealogical connections weren't complicated enough, combine them with the inexplicable miracle of my recent Time-Travel experiences, and I had somehow met four generations of Tom's ancestors: not just Cousin Emaline but his great-uncle Dashiel Quigg, a cousin of Charles Ives' wife, Harmony, and his son, Uncle Eddie, and even Supply Belcher himself.

It all fell suddenly into place and explained – if one can use the word “explained” in so inexplicably fantastic a context – how the Kapellmeister, that time he showed up in Tom's basement back in Marple was not looking for my help or expertise in finding the thing: he was specifically there looking for Tom Purdue's.

And it was all because of Tom's family connections. Perhaps he knew Tom would be Burt Norton's heir before he did.

How do I explain this to him, sitting there, waiting for an answer?

But I'd already said enough. How could I have known anything about his cousin and her husband having studied at Harvard, particularly with John Knowles Paine, and specifically that comment about his amateurish style? How could I come up with an excuse that would sound remotely reasonable, that wouldn't make him think me completely insane?

I couldn't exactly imagine myself starting off, “Remember when you'd been kidnapped? and then this guy just appeared in your basement...?” That same basement where later on his assistant, Amanda Wences, would've been killed?

Between the basement of Aunt Jane's house and that tunnel under the cemetery wall, I can't imagine I was the only one to experience something outside mere normalcy, difficult to understand, much less explain. Given the frequency these things happened to me, isn't it possible Tom had similar experiences over the years he'd lived there?

There were also things I knew Cameron hadn't told me about, whether it was the result of running into the Kapellmeister, or any of the other off-the-wall stuff like I'd experienced in that place. Once, he let slip something about Tom's childhood he couldn't possibly have heard about from me: where had he learned that?

So, let's assume that hadn't been the first time the Kapellmeister visited Tom's. Initially, I thought he'd mistaken me for Tom. Maybe he took me along because, well... I was the one he found?

I had spent too much time thinking about who the Kapellmeister could be, hard enough to tell based on my experiences; now I wondered how much he'd known about Tom's family tree – and why? Did Tom himself understand the extent of his family's heritage, that he might somehow be descended from “The Handel of Maine”?

For months, I've thought about mentioning this if I ever found him in a receptive mood, expecting either Tom would think I'm “bat-shit crazy” or he'd say matter-of-factly, “Oh, so you've met the Kapellmeister?”

Naturally, I started fumbling and, conscious he was still waiting for me, ended up choosing the most obvious, barely believable course:

“Something I'd read somewhere? You know how I store all these useless facts...”

As if he was going to buy that. In fact, the way he looked at me, I was sure he hadn't.

A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed image of freshly scrubbed youth, Cameron, tucking his shirt in, came downstairs and called out, “Okay, who's next?”

“I am,” I said, definitely a little too eagerly, glad for the escape.

“What's that you guys are looking at?” Cameron peered over Tom's shoulder at the music he was holding – an excellent distraction.

Sure his cheerful vitality would prove contagious, I hurried up the steps faster than my aging bones would care to negotiate, outmaneuvered by my sense of relief at breaking free from Tom's cobra-like stare.

Once under the water, I looked forward to it soothing hundreds of aching muscles jolted out of their characteristic deep stasis, trying to keep my back from cramping up into a thousand blazing spasms. Exercise is one thing and “fight or flight” another, but, clearly, faced with imminent attack, I could neither run nor hide.

It also gave me the briefest of opportunities to work out a solution to the answer Tom was expecting and which I knew, eventually, would be brought up again: “how did I know that?”

Before the dust settled last fall once Tom's condition stabilized in the hospital, I was on-line trying to find verification of my experience, searching for 'the Belcher Codex' or anything related to Supply Belcher. One website related to Harvard and John Knowles Paine proved illuminating: it didn't mention Emaline Norton, but mentioned Hyde in passing.

“Nice idea,” I thought, impatiently drying myself off, eager to get back to Tom and Cameron before I missed anything important, “assuming I could find that website again, if it had any more information.” It wasn't likely, not about an unpromising student who'd never amounted to much; I'd wondered if he'd even survived that fall! It was a relief to discover he existed at all. Still, the only hit on his name was that one line in a list of Harvard students, Class of '88. At least he'd survived.

In an 1890s history of Farmington, Maine, Belcher's home when the Kapellmeister and I inadvertently dropped in on him in 1814, a lengthy genealogical section traced Belcher's family through his son-in-law Cornelius Norton's descendants. All I could find was a single mention of Emaline Norton, overshadowed by cousin Lily, later the opera singer Lilian Nordica.

Just because I found nothing more on-line didn't mean they hadn't been successful, though I'd hoped if they'd had some of their music performed, there would've been mention of it, maybe even a review. What happened after they left Harvard; how seriously did the accident impact Hyde's career; when – and why! – did they get married? Did she stop composing after that, the fate of many talented young ladies? What kind of career could Hyde have had? Ironic, then, their “retiring” to this very cabin to live out their days!

What did that “retirement” do to either of their high hopes and dreams? Depending on his injuries, couldn't Hyde have managed a work the Boston Symphony could have played if it was good enough? Someone as sure of himself as Jeckelson Hyde had been only an hour before he attacked us would understandably be bitter.

And what about Emeline? Surely, she would've been bitter, too, a woman robbed of her own dreams of becoming a composer. What if she married him out of pity or possibly guilt – if anyone was guilty, shouldn't it be me, whisked out of the way in the nick of time to avoid falling with him?

The note she'd attached to her Cello Sonata made Emaline's inspiration sound more like revenge than belatedly fulfilling a childhood dream. Does this mood play out in the course of the piece, darkly violent?

By the time I came back downstairs, dressed for a beautiful spring morning's walk, Tom and Cameron were at the dining table, going over different piles of apparently sorted manuscripts spread out between them. They'd been deep in discussion as I tried walking quietly down the stairs but they stopped suddenly when a step creaked.

I thought Cameron said, “you know how Terry can be, always so logical before coming out with some wildly irrational deduction.” Immediately, they reverted to the topic at hand, paging through Hyde's experimental pieces.

“I can't be sure,” Tom was explaining. “I haven't really examined them yet, but Hyde's pieces aren't random collections of notes. Definitely atonal, but I see underlying patterns not far removed from something systematic.”

“You mean like serialism,” Cameron asked with mounting skepticism. “That one sketch is dated 1892. Brahms and Tchaikovsky were still alive!”

“Well, there are lots of tritones which automatically weaken the harmonic stability, but in some of them, he stresses one pair of tritones at the beginning and end but digresses to others in between.”

“That's more like something basically tonal,” I suggested, “substituting tritones and augmented chords for perfect fifths and major or minor triads.”

Tom stopped in his tracks. “Come on, Terry, how would you know that?”

“You mentioned his digressing from the same intervals opening and closing the piece? Most students would be thinking harmonically, not contrapuntally.”

A glimpse of another distant conversation started coming back to me: didn't Paine mention Hyde had an aunt traveling around Europe who'd been sending him copies of those weird, “atonal” late pieces Liszt wrote? Wasn't my visit the same year Liszt died? It's probably best I didn't mention that, since Tom was already suspicious enough.

“It might be interesting to compare them to Liszt's lugubrious gondolas,” I said, thinking of those spare, experimental late piano works.

“But how could an American student have even known about them before 1892?”

“He doesn't give us much in the way of expression marks,” Cameron said. “I'm sure a sympathetic performer who can make sense out of this language will make a great difference in people's reactions.”

“Just as an indifferent one reinforces for anyone not liking it it's garbage.”

“You always say that, Terry.”

“It's always true.”

Once Tom returned from a refreshing shower, dressed in a powder blue sweater and old blue jeans only accentuating his thinness, he suggested packing a thermos of coffee and some cookies to take along. “Yesterday, Mrs. Danvers left us some of her homemade chicken salad for picnic sandwiches, but it's too soon for lunch, yet.”

“Any idea what's next with these?” Cameron gathered them back into the box. “Maybe we could start cataloging them this afternoon.”

“Wait,” Tom started to fuss, “no need to pack them away, just yet.”

I thought he sounded a little too snappy, like Cameron did something wrong.

“We'll only be gone for maybe an hour,” Tom added. “It's not like somebody's going to break in and steal them.”

“These could be important.” I ignored the tension. “A previously unknown experimenter in atonality years before Schoenberg – an unknown female composer...?”

“Not entirely unknown: apparently someone does know something about them – you, for one. But did either of them publish their music? Is there any record of any performances somewhere? Or maybe some critical reaction?”

“Come on, Tom,” I bantered, “you know they didn't have recording technology in those days.” Predictably, my attempted levity fell flat.

“If my health were better, I could see myself digging around the dusty archives of Harvard or some museums in Boston. For now, that's beyond me – so I guess you'll have to do it.”

“Who, me?!”

So, this is why he asked me to come visit him. This couldn't have waited until I'd returned from Italy, something so secretive he couldn't risk talking about it over the phone? I tried not to feel affronted, or backed into a corner on this one, staring at him a little too long.

“They're your family – they are your family, aren't they? Shouldn't you do them the family honor and publish the discovery yourself? It's not like either of us are trained musicologists with any scholarly credentials.”

“Terry, there may be boxes of stuff in the attic,” he said, pointing. “If somebody'd check and bring them downstairs, maybe I could dig through them, see if there are any journals or letters.”

“Maybe first,” I wondered, “we should look through the music, see if there's anything worth publishing.”

“Oh, trust me, there is.”

How was I going to write about two people I'd actually met, whose teacher actually gave me some wonderful quotes I could use, without mentioning (oh, yeah) I'd met them visiting Harvard in 1886? Did Paine ever write anything down on, say, report cards of some sort, in files stashed away in a departmental office? But the Music Department's building didn't exist before the 1920s: where did they keep records like that when Paine taught his classes in the chapel or that chemistry lab when it wasn't in use?

“You know, we could organize an informal performance of some of the pieces, do a video and post it on You-Tube. If I'm up to playing the cello part” – not likely but a nice thought – “and you can handle the piano part... Not a complete performance, excerpts maybe (just a tease, really), add some commentary.”

“You think anyone's interested in hearing two amateurs, two 'dead-end' composers like us? How often do you hear John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, or any of those other Boston composers in concert halls today?”

“It doesn't have to be a significant new addition, just a little perspective. If that's why you asked me to come...”

“Wait – no, Terry, that's not why I asked you to come out here to see me, not at this particular time.”

“Well then, why did you?”

“Let's go out and see the Stones, first.”

Tom led the way with his cane and – (“uneven ground, you know”) – took an old hand-carved walking stick for added stability. When he was a child, its ornately detailed head, an old man with long streaming hair and bulging eyes, frightened him. Now he felt drawn to it as if they shared a common destiny. We took the flagstone path that stretched across the front of the cabin. The yard, fairly small, looking over the valley, sloped gently to trees that hid the road below and the lake beyond.

“Burt willed most of the property to a state-run conservancy, preserving the forest. I'm prohibited from selling any of the land. Not that I'd want to. For now, nobody seems to know who the next heirs are – I certainly don't have any. If they can't scare up any more cousins, everything goes to the conservancy.”

“There must be dozens of them lurking around somewhere,” I said, as we headed around toward the backyard, “cousins, I mean. Supply Belcher had a large family – they must be scattered all over Maine.”

Tom stopped in his tracks and turned; I'd been looking out at the view, so naturally I walked right into him.

“How the hell could you possibly know that! Beyond his being a silly-looking name I'd read in books on American music, I had no idea who Supply Belcher was until a couple months ago.”

While I stammered, barely correcting my own balance, Cameron came to the rescue. “Remember that pre-concert talk that involved William Billings?”

“What? Oh, right,” I said, “that. Yeah, one thing after another eventually led to Wikipedia and there was Supply Belcher and before long I'm waist-deep in an on-line genealogy of the town of Farmington.”

Lips pursed, his eyes set to glare, Tom wasn't impressed I knew Belcher had a son named Hiram or his oldest daughter married someone named Norton, at which point Tom just shook his head.

“Oh, and Lilian Nordica,” I added, snapping my fingers as if my memory just recalled it. “You're probably related to her. Wasn't her birth name something like Lily Norton? Grew up in Farmington, too.”

Tom turned away, shaking his head, and muttered, “she was Cousin Emaline's cousin...”

Cameron gave me the universal signal for “Cut!”

The path through the yard, dirt beaten over numerous generations to the consistency of concrete, branched off the flagstone walk as it wound its way through some wildflowers to the back door's stoop and disappeared into the new-growth woods at the back corner where we soon entered a tunnel of dense maple and pine trees. Oaks and birches became more frequent the further we went, more established trees of the older woods, leaves still coming in. Violets and hepatica were already blooming, and I saw some Jack-in-the-Pulpits shooting up.

Not having read any James Fennimore Cooper as a boy, my imagination was more filled with images from Thoreau's Maine Woods, especially the settlers he described wandering from one lake or river to another. I'd read it in college but forgot how close he'd come to Swanville: didn't he head inland once he reached Bangor?

Eventually, Tom reverted to the docent pointing out his best guesses about this flower or that tree, more subdued than usual. “I've never been here in the spring; this is all new to me.”

Cameron, apparently lost in his own thoughts, stopped to examine a tree or listen to a woodpecker deeper in the forest.

When the path made a soft bend to the left, Tom stopped. “I need to catch my breath. Up ahead, there's a fork – the right takes you up to the top of the hill.”

Tom propped himself against a steeply leaning tree trunk, watching Cameron who wandered tentatively a few feet up the hillside path. “These trails are all dead-ends: so, chances are, you can't get too lost.”

When I started telling him about our wandering around the center of Legnago, he asked why I'd chosen to go there.

“Several people kept mentioning 'Salieri' and Legnago is Salieri's birthplace, so since we were staying close by, I figured 'why not?' Everything's 'Salieri This' or 'Salieri That,' even if he left town at 14.”

Tom became more interested once I mentioned the library and some old letters, maybe finding something out about Salieri's early education. “Or better yet, uncover some correspondence about librettos between Salieri and Lorenzo daPonte.”

“Despite your lack of musicological credentials? Wouldn't anything like that be in Vienna?”

“That's what everybody else said, but who knows...”

He'd forgotten what Mozart's widow told the Novellos, how Salieri gave up on Cosí before her husband began writing the opera. He'd never heard about the discovery of two trios Salieri'd already composed, how she'd said Mozart's success with the opera, one Salieri saw no promise in, may have been the source of their rivalry.

“Wasn't Mozart complaining about Salieri's back-stabbing two years after he'd arrived in Vienna?”

“What if something more sinister materialized after Cosí?”

“Something that would've angered Salieri enough to commit murder two years later? Unlikely...”

I hadn't meant that, specifically: wouldn't the rivalry between them become moot after Joseph II died, not long after Cosí's premiere? If Salieri stepped down as Director of the Court Opera with no interest from the new emperor, what was the point? They were little kids vying for attention from Joseph: brother Leopold wasn't impressed.

“So, you found a letter dated December, 1791, saying 'Mozart is dead – I killed him and I'm glad – yours truly, Salieri'?”

“Not quite, but I did find some letters from Salieri's apprentice around 1789.”

Tom leaned back against the tree, deep in his own thoughts which I read as “piqued curiosity” and continued rambling on.

“The librarian said these were newsy letters telling everybody about life in Vienna, how helpful the Maestro was, 'like a father.' I'm waiting for copies so I can have them translated, so we'll see.”

Now rested, we gathered Cameron from his reveries and proceeded along the path, taking the more level fork to the left. Overreaching branches and deteriorating conditions along the walkway had narrowed the space considerably.

“After all these years, I don't know what shape this path is in, so don't wander too far out of ear-shot.”

“No cave-ins, bears waking up from hibernation,” I asked, “or pools of quicksand?”

“Probably no quicksand up here, but I can't speak for bears and cave-ins.”

“Seriously?” With that, Cameron stayed close behind me.

I explained how I thought there might be some old correspondence in America, places where daPonte lived.

“You mean like Sunbury?” It always cracked Tom up to think of Mozart's librettist running a distillery in the wilds of Central Pennsylvania. “Find anything?”

“Sunbury came up empty, according to their historical society,” I said, trudging along.

“Why do I get the feeling you're dying to tell me someplace didn't come up empty, no doubt close to home? Let me guess, the local Doylestown Historical Society had what you're looking for?”

This time, it was my turn to stop in my tracks and laugh. “Now, how could you have possibly known that?”

This time, Cameron bumped into me as we all stopped to enjoy a good laugh, spooking something on the path ahead.

“What was that?” Cameron stepped back cautiously.

“Relax, squirrels here aren't terribly dangerous...”

We resumed the hike – turning into more of one than I'd imagined – and I resumed the tale of my Doylestown discovery, how there were several pages, all in Italian, quite fragile, addressed to daPonte.

“I only saw the first page and didn't see the signature, but it was dated July, 1816, and mentioned Salieri.”

“Really!”

“1816 was the year of Salieri's Jubilee, the 50^th Anniversary of his arrival in Vienna, a party thrown by his students.”

“Which,” Tom recalled, “included Schubert but not Beethoven.”

“And someone called 'Fedele Destromano.'”

“Sorry, never heard of him.” Tom sounded dismissive. “Did he ever become famous?”

“Not that I'm aware of, yet, but in those letters I found at the Legnago library, written almost 30 years earlier, Salieri's new apprentice, freshly arrived in Vienna, proudly said the Maestro's librettist (unnamed) had dubbed him 'Fedele Destromano,' his Faithful Right-Hand!”

“So, you're thinking these letters are both written by the same person, Salieri's new apprentice as a boy, fresh from his hometown, and then his former student, now a man in his, what, 40s? – presumably an established composer, enough to warrant being included in the Maestro's Jubilee – reporting back to his old friend, Lorenzo daPonte?”

Another sharp turn in the path led to a side-branch descending over stones set into the dirt like so many steps. Tom interrupted himself to mention it, pushing aside some underbrush in the way.

“That's the path to the pond?” Cameron didn't sound as eager as before. Peering under the branches, he sounded quite disappointed.

“It is, and apparently too overgrown. I haven't been down there in 55 years, so I've no idea what you'd find. Obviously, I won't be able to make it, myself. Probably for the best...”

“Some of those rocks may be loose, Cameron, I wouldn't recommend trying it. Besides, it's too chilly to go swimming today.”

“Oh, it's not that – I just wanted to see it. It sounded – idyllic.”

Tom suggested pushing ahead, the path to the Stones beginning to rise slightly. “Don't worry,” he reassured us, “we're almost there.”

My thoughts were still on these letters, once I'd started talking about them. I knew I hadn't seen more than a few pages and could barely understand the Italian, but their potential was exhilarating.

“There's no other evidence I'm aware of corroborating what Constanze told the Novellos in 1829. And several writers dismissed that as her 'not remembering things clearly' about an event that happened forty years earlier. After all, Constanze was – what, 67 years old...?”

“Not that old,” Tom sniffed.

“...and the Novellos mentioned she was quite healthy.”

If they'd been concerned she was losing her wits, they might've said so – they did mention how feeble Mozart's sister was. Besides, Constanze was there, a direct witness to what went on – Nannerl wasn't.

If the first letter's Speranzani dubbed “Fedele Destromano” was the same “Fedele Destromano” mentioned in daPonte's letter, he would most likely be another direct witness, more direct than some bystander's descendant two generations removed.

“If it's true, that he says the same thing Constanze said, then that could prove whatever happened over Cosí caused friction...”

“Caused friction?, Tom laughed. “What kind of 'friction'? Enough for him to contemplate poisoning someone he suddenly saw as his arch-enemy?”

Behind me, Cameron sighed uncomfortably as I tried to control becoming more defensive.

“Why must it always become extreme, so black-and-white? Why not enough to cool things off, they weren't speaking to each other?”

Once Cameron placed his hand on my shoulder, I began to calm down. So far, I thought, everything was mere conjecture. I still haven't read them completely and I needed to get them translated.

“Very little is known about what was going on around them at the time Mozart began working on Cosí,” I said. “We know Salieri started work on setting it – as La Scuola degli amante. We know, from what Constanze said, Salieri gave up on it: when? Why? Mozart was rehearsing it by New Year's Eve.

“That leaves maybe two months where we know nothing about daPonte's libretto. We know Salieri and daPonte had previously fallen out. Did the Emperor lose patience with them and 'assign' it to Mozart instead?”

“Terry, do you ever get the feeling maybe the Universe is playing you? I mean, first someone tells you about Salieri, you go to Salieri's hometown and find the first letter; then, in your hometown museum, you find the second letter, both written by the same guy? Isn't that just a bit of a coincidence?”

I couldn't imagine what Tom would make of Dionisio Ciapollo or of Guido the Gondolier's taking me to the Mocenigo Palace, then Zusanna at the Villa Venticelli, each one pushing me closer to Salieri! Was it the hand of Fate or some cosmic plot to get me involved in something I wouldn't otherwise have considered?

What are the chances I'd walk into this clearing and find Tom's arranged an appointment with the Kapellmeister, that he's in on this? Am I being recruited for another of his hare-brained musicological quests?

Wait! Tom told me about this Casaubon Society collating all the world's knowledge: does this have something to do with that? Is this an audition to prove our worth, a test we must pass?

Speaking of cosmic coincidences, what about inheriting a cabin and discovering music written by your own ancestors, hidden in your bedroom...?

“Tom, if you think I'm making this up,” I said, reaching for my phone, “and I can imagine why you would, I've got some photos on my phone of both letters – take a look!”

I found the picture Toni had taken of the apprentice's letter from Legnago and held it out to him. “There. See?”

Tom glanced down at it and, after a few seconds, said, “Sorry, I can't see it, here. The light's too dim and there's glare on the screen. Plus I didn't bring my reading glasses.”

I looked at it myself and realized he's right; plus, it's too small. I'd need to enlarge it, do a close-up. Back in the dining room, maybe Cameron could upload it to Tom's computer.

“Besides,” Tom said, “I can't really help you – my Italian's a bit, how you say... rusty? Particularly, my 18^th Century Italian...”

“When did you ever learn to speak Italian? Really? I never knew that,” I laughed as I put the phone away.

“Susan and I planned a belated honeymoon to Florence but it never materialized.”

“Ah,” I said, aware this would open up another volume of painful memories that would ultimately touch on their failed marriage, the divorce, their daughter's death, the final impulse into his creative downward spiral.

“Anyway, to change the subject,” he said, pointing ahead, “Cameron, Terry – we're here.”

Just one last turn, and another slight incline.

If no one came back here since the time Burt inherited the place – Tom said for years, Burt rarely spent even a few weeks here during the summer; barely at all, that last decade – the path, for hardly ever being used, was overall in remarkably good shape beyond the encroaching underbrush, weeds, and overhanging branches. I'd assumed it would have been obliterated by trees reclaiming the land, or the lack of footsteps packing down the dirt. How had the Stones fared all these centuries if left alone with Nature?

It reminded me of a theater's backstage entrance through the wings, squeezing between a crop of ferns already well developed; the broad trunk of an extremely old oak tree very nearly blocked the way. Two or three young pines, decades, not centuries, old, filled in what appeared to be an opening leading to the stage.

With his walking stick, Tom pushed back a chest-level branch of a pine tree hanging over the path and peered in, making sure everything was as he imagined it. “Be careful, watch your step.”

My phone rang with a special ring-tone I hadn't heard in months and had hoped not to hear for some time.

“I'm sorry, Tom, I have to take this: it's the International Music Police.”

After stepping into the clearing, I said “Hello, Kerr here.”

A voice said, “Hello, Professor Kerr – this is Bond... Sarah Bond.”

= = = = = = =

to be continued...

©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train

The Salieri Effect: Installment #6

Chapter 2 ended with Kerr's arrival in Maine, greeted at Tom's door by his grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who was not thrilled the guests were late. As the evening progressed, Kerr and Tom reminisce about the Old Days at Faber but mostly about things that have been bothering Tom since he inherited the cabin in Swanville. There's the Casaubon Society and also the sense Clara, the Artificial Creativity software Tom developed which then escaped into the ether, may still be around, waiting. When Kerr follows Tom upstairs, he has the uncomfortable feeling someone else is in the room.

= = = = = = =

CHAPTER 3

Cameron was already up, foraging through cupboards to the left of the sink, when I ambled, half asleep, into the kitchen.

“I wonder where he keeps anything we could use for breakfast? I'm starving.”

I hadn't thought he'd noticed me, only his instinct making him assume this vague shape was me and not our host.

Without answering, I ambled past him to an old-fashioned pantry next to the refrigerator, opened one of its doors and revealed an array of what I announced were the raw materials for home-made meals.

“How did you know that? Didn't you say you'd never been here before?”

“Data gleaned from being in old-fashioned kitchens before, my dear Watson,” I mumbled, poking around for what might pass as coffee. “Really old kitchens would have a pantry room to store food,” I explained. “This contraption kept the basics closer at hand.”

“I suppose I should just get something to tide me over till Tom gets up or Mrs. Danvers arrives,” he said and scanned the shelves for something a little closer to a finished product.

In the refrigerator, which appeared well-stocked, he noticed plates of left-overs from the dinner she'd cooked for us the night before with other containers all handily labeled in clear, black markers with specific dates. Not sure when she'd be back again – did she come and cook every day? – I suggested not getting ahead of schedule.

“If there's milk in the fridge, there might be cereal behind Door #2, but I don't recall Tom being a milk-drinker.”

Behind the door I'd pointed toward, Cameron discovered only a few boxes of shredded wheat and oatmeal; then, wrinkling his nose, he made the soft, strangulated cry of one resigned to a slow death.

He enjoyed the occasional salad but loathed oatmeal and probably never willingly ate shredded wheat which he dismissed as Old-Folks' Food. He wasn't yet old enough to comprehend the necessities for a high-fiber diet.

“When will she show up?” He peered into the cavernous antique of a refrigerator in case anything else edible would materialize.

“I think she'd said before lunch-time or so,” and pointed to a compartment on the door that revealed a half-dozen eggs.

“Ah, that's a step in the right direction. Well – any bacon, d'you think?”

After the storm's ominous nastiness with its overhanging clouds, winds, and violent downpours, the rain had barely ended when Tom went up to bed; the wind still howled stubbornly after I'd gone upstairs, myself. The morning turned out to be a benediction, one of those nearly cloudless, brilliant sunrises you thought you'd never see again, light pouring in victoriously from every direction through so many windows, augmented by the songs of birds who sounded equally delighted. I used to think birds singing at sunrise signaled they'd survived another night.

Cameron woke up his usual cheerful self, his hair stylishly unkempt, showing an easy smile despite his frustration prowling for food. I, as usual cloaked in my traditional curmudgeonliness, remained numb, achy and irritable. Perhaps Tom, evidently still asleep, would be improved with the new day, but that, in due time, remained to be seen.

New in the '80s, the microwave still had the appearance of an antique in this 1940s kitchen but I succeeded in converting a measuring cup of water into an unpromising cup of instant coffee. The side-yard, refreshingly visible beyond the curtains, I suspected was probably larger once before the woods crept closer to the house.

“Here, if you want oatmeal – or I could make scrambled eggs for us?” Cameron tested the heft of an iron skillet.

“That's okay,” I said, sliding the bowl aside, “you go ahead – I'll wait.”

It's not that Tom was being a poor host: he was ill, recuperating from a stroke, and alone in the house. Though our visit was haphazardly arranged, the invitation long-standing, our arrival wasn't sudden. It felt odd he'd know we were finally coming but hadn't stocked the place with things for his guests. Oh, well...

“We'll go into town and pick up a few things at the store,” I said, sipping at the barely palatable coffee.

“Assuming we can even find the town, much less find our way back.”

Cameron opened another door on the pantry to reveal a weird, cone-shaped contraption, and stared at it with confusion and curiosity.

“It's a flour-sifter, fully intact.” He looked at me with even more confusion.

It was amusing how this old kitchen reminded me of my grandmother's house, yet to Cameron it was an interactive museum.

“People still bake their own cakes?” He, of course, would just order one at the bakery in whatever flavor he desired.

“I doubt Tom ever did. It's unlikely Mrs. Danvers bakes anything here, but I'm sure she would in her own kitchen.”

“D'you think she'd left some slices of cake for us in the fridge?”

Disappointed to find no container marked CAKE, he stood back and sighed again. Ah, to be young and invincible: at his age, my breakfast was often a slice of cold pizza and a soda.

Opening another, smaller door on the pantry, covered by pierced metal grillwork, I thought I might find a covered cake dish – Grandmother's cupboards always reminded me of an advent calendar, only focused on food. Instead, I found numerous jars of pickled onions, cauliflower, and mushrooms which, I imagined, wouldn't be good for Tom's blood pressure. Cameron's nose wrinkled like we'd stumbled on a mad scientist's collection of eyeballs and brains preserved in formaldehyde, fascinating but repelling. He stepped back to avoid whatever I'd find next, perhaps a real body.

“So,” quickly changing the subject, settling on eggs, “what did you guys talk about last night after I went to bed? You were still at it when the wind woke me up around 2:00.”

“Oh, uhm...” What we'd thought about as opposed to what we'd actually said might've been two different things. “This and that...”

The calendar hanging on the refrigerator door showed a garden scene in full bloom with several birds and butterflies suspended mid-air. The month was May (not a far cry from April), the year, 1959; more appropriate than the frigid scene of kids skating on a frozen pond from the January '54 calendar in my room. The one I'd seen in the study by the fireplace last night, with its winter woodland scene from December of 1961, was the year Tom's childhood visits to the cabin had ended so abruptly.

He said his father never explained why they stopped coming up after that, and Tom felt too embarrassed to ask, sure it had something to do with his getting caught skinny-dipping at the pond. If his dad thought being a musician wasn't “manly” enough, what would he make of Tom's swimming naked with another boy?

Years later, his father already ill, Tom overheard him complain to a card-playing buddy how the “little old biddies” in his late-wife's family were so intent on marrying him off to the Widow Cosgrove. “It was the summer after my mother died and I guess Dad thought the visit would cheer me up a bit. We hadn't counted on their plan to keep my dad 'in the family,' and I remember how we'd left rather suddenly. He hadn't explained to me why and I was thinking, 'well, don't ask...'

“As far as I can remember, Mrs. Cosgrove's husband had recently died – she was the youngest daughter of Grandpa Peter Norton and about the same age as Dad, plus she already had two kids.” Tom was keeping track with his eyes closed as his finger moved across an imaginary chart of the Norton Family Tree. “The idea my cousins Ben and Martha could've become my step-brother and -sister was enough to make me gag,” he laughed. “I hated Ben's guts and Martha was the prissiest of the whole bunch.

“Oh, if Dad'd been interested in Melody Quigg – she's the daughter of my Uncle Eddie[n-d] that would've been okay with me.”

(Eddie Quigg? Melody? Why did they sound familiar – had he mentioned them before?)

“As it was, Burt was the only cousin I really got along with but we hardly ever bothered corresponding after that.”

I suspected Tom hung the old calendar there as a reminder of pleasant memories – other than a brief visit for Uncle Max's funeral in the '80s, it was his last time at the cabin – which might explain the kitchen's calendar, but the one in my room was from before Tom would have ever visited here.

“Yeah,” Cameron said, watching me at the fridge, “what is it with the calendars in this place? They're not exactly current. The one in my room is for June, 1951, and this one's 1959.”

“Right...” I looked up at him, somewhat mystified myself. “The one in my room is from 1954, – January, an ice-skating scene – and the one in the study is a winter woodland from December '61.”

Cameron cracked a pair of eggs into a sizzling skillet, a lot of butter and too much salt for my taste. “Well, mine's pleasant enough, a bunch of naked boys at some swimming hole – doesn't make me shiver when I see it.”

“So that's why you chose that room, is it, a touch of porn?”

“Hardly,” he laughed, flipping his middle finger, “it's like some Norman Rockwell painting! A deftly placed branch, a modestly raised thigh...”

“We've stepped into a time capsule from the distant past, between all the furniture and everything. Even the calendars are antiques.”

Cameron smiled and thought it was a nice touch, a break from reality.

“I gathered, from the aroma wafting upstairs, if my house were on fire it wouldn't smell like good old-fashioned fried eggs!” Warmly dressed for a wintry morning, sunshine aside, Tom shuffled into the kitchen, surprised to find Cameron at the stove rather than ransacking the refrigerator, as if he expected me to do the cooking. With an awkward smile, he could tell we were first-time visitors to Maine, too lightly dressed for a deceptively chilly morning. It was, after all, spring now and wasn't it supposed to be warm?

“Did you want some eggs, Tom?” Cameron asked, holding up the spatula. “You could have these – or I could scramble some.”

“Ah, thanks, but right now I just need some water – and some coffee.”

He'd already had his limit of eggs this week, presumably watching his cholesterol. As a result, today he'd settle for oatmeal.

“I suppose I don't have to tell you, young man, not to grow old because I'm sure this antiquated curmudgeon, here, has been telling you that for – well, some time now, am I right?” Tom forgot I'd known Cameron only five years – but yes, how often have I warned him about aging? We both smirked.

Tom reached for a small, ornate silver tray with a dozen prescription bottles and doled six pills into a shot glass.

“So, what was this 'nice touch,' this 'break from reality' you're talking about?”

“Oh, Cameron and I were talking about the calendars hanging in each room, different months, each one dating from the '50s.”

“The one in the study's 1961, to be precise, and the parlor's 1960.”

As Tom downed his pills, followed with a chaser of water – “Cheers, everyone!” – Cameron took a closer look at the refrigerator.

“Today is Sunday the 17^th, isn't it? And here, it's Sunday the 17^th – same day and date, different month and year.”

“I hadn't noticed the dates on the other calendars,” I said, “brilliant observation!”

“And what, dear Watson, are you able to deduce from that?” Tom asked.

“That it's probably not a random coincidence?” Cameron slid his eggs out onto a plate. “I'd have to confirm some others...”

I reported from the dining room it was Sunday the 17^th there as well as the study and in the parlor.

Tom opened a packet of instant oatmeal and, measuring in some water, placed the old dark-blue, rustic-looking bowl in the microwave. “Mrs. Danvers does not approve of instant oatmeal. Frankly, neither do I, but... Ah,” he interrupted himself, “you're waiting for an explanation about the calendars, yes? Terry, you don't want some oatmeal – or eggs?”

When I said I'd probably scramble a couple eggs and get some toast, he quietly agreed that sounded much more palatable. “If you like, I'll ask Mrs. Danvers to get some bacon or sausages?”

I shook my head and said “Not for me, but thanks anyway,” as Cameron nodded with an enthusiastic smile, “Yes, please!” His toast was ready just as he'd finished the last of his eggs. By the time the microwave beeped with Tom's oatmeal, I had chopped up some fresh peppers and mushrooms for an omelet.

Holding the steaming bowl aloft between his fingers, he offered it to the assembled with a whispered introibo ad altare Dei.

Cameron laughed. “Ambrosia?”

“More like Buck Mulligan's shaving cream,” I said.

“Very good!”

Tom confessed to being neither stately nor plump, “but I did once own a yellow dressing gown when I was young.”

The bowl, he pointed out, was the last survivor of a set of six. “Mrs. Danvers' grandmother apparently broke the first one sometime back in the 1920s and they were considered old even then.”

Survivor or not and regardless of its age – the guess was it came with the original furnishings before the Civil War – Tom thought it no doubt felt better still being useful in the world. “Rather than, like so many of us old people, being hidden away in some dark cupboard for fear of being broken.”

“How very anthropomorphic of you.” I saluted him with my personality-free coffee mug, mass-produced, recent and cheap, guaranteed to be short-lived.

“I imagine anything, regardless of its inanimateness, would prefer being useful – wouldn't you?”

We could hear the birds singing outside – I recognized robins and wrens, in the distance a cardinal with its “spring song.” I was looking forward to a walk and seeing the rest of it.

“But we're still waiting for your undoubtedly illuminating explanation about these calendars, you know.” I whisked my eggs into the skillet.

Instead, Tom asked me if I remembered the first time I'd cooked when he came over to my place for dinner. “We'd met during orientation and here we only lived about a block apart.”

“I had planned an old bachelor's staple,” I told Cameron, “macaroni and cheese, but the store was all out of cheddar.”

“The closest thing they had was Port Wine cheese” – Tom made a face – “which unfortunately turned everything a very bright pink!”

“Come on, it tasted fine, Tom, admit it.”

“Yes, but it was pink!”

After a good laugh was shared by all, Cameron and I continued staring at Tom until he finally began how, when he moved in, he'd brought only one current calendar with him from Pennsylvania, one he'd kept on his wall of his study to mark doctor's appointments or birthdays, or when the bills were due.

He found this box of old, practically unused calendars in an upstairs closet, enough to put one in each room. If opened to a particular month, it could have the same weekdays and dates.

“I figured I'd remember which month or year it was: the important thing was to remind me of the day and date, like a 'design statement,' not that anybody's been here to notice it.”

“So,” Cameron realized, “instead of 'I'm staying in the room-on-the-left-at-the-top-of-the-stairs' or 'the blue room,' I'm in the '1951 Room'?”

“Very good!”

Tom took his oatmeal over and sat down at the kitchen table, a small square-cut block of wide planks on thick square-cut legs, nothing fancy, functional but showing its pioneer origins and considerable age. There was room for only two equally rustic chairs, also square-cut with little concern for comfort, without getting in the way.

“It's not the original table I remember from my visits; somebody sold that one off and replaced it with this one. Not sure where it came from – Mrs. Danvers tells me it's quite old.”

He excused himself for sounding like a museum docent, but he'd learned so much about things he'd taken for granted before. “After all,” he nodded, “you're the first visitors to Tom Purdue's Lost Museum.” She'd filled him in on so many details, especially the family history, he thought he should be writing it all down.

“Curiously, she knows nothing about the Standing Stones, whatever history there may be, or won't talk about them if she does. A local historian at the Swanville Library hardly knew anything about them, either. I remember some legends Uncle Max used to tell us, but those were mostly ghost stories meant to scare us kids.”

They were best seen at sunset, the stones, facing west, but that also meant walking home through the woods after dark. “The place was scary enough without having to deal with all that nonsense.”

The path might be overgrown – he hadn't been down there since moving in – since no one bothered to keep it under control after Burt stopped coming here, even for summers, over a decade ago. And he had no idea how the clearing where the stones were has fared once the woods started taking over again.

“I'm worried about anybody vandalizing them, of course, but these days, if it became a popular 'local legend,' you never know. Kids from miles around would flock there to drink beer and smoke pot.

“And that's all I'd need, have some twit, drunk, high and horny, fall off the cliff edge and I'd be sued for negligence even though the property's clearly posted 'No Trespassing' and 'No Hunting'.” And with the swimming hole not far from there, he added, the place could easily become a perfectly isolated hippy hang-out.

“But you'll see. It'll be beautiful in the morning, the sun shining out over the valley; the hillside's still in shadows. Of course, it's been many years – I'd only ever seen it in summertime. You look west from there – the hill's behind you, and,” he added, pointing as he spoke, “the lake's to your south.”

“You can't see the sunrise from the Stones?” Cameron leaned over Tom's shoulder to look out the window. “Isn't that odd? Aren't stone circles supposed to line up with sunrise on the winter solstice?”

There was nothing to see beyond the edge of the woods with its encroaching underbrush of bushes, saplings, and spring-blooming weeds. The larger trees weren't far beyond with no sky visible from the back. I looked out the other window toward the front of the yard and saw a deer quietly nibbling on some violets.

“I'd thought that, too, since some of the aunts and uncles back then used to talk about 'our own little Stonehenge,' but the library's historian – what was her name? Mrs. Salisbury, maybe?[n-d]hadn't mentioned it.”

If it wasn't meant to be some kind of celestial calendar, why did somebody go to the trouble of building it?

“Perhaps it's more recent than that and built with another purpose in mind. I don't know, witchcraft? Some 18th Century coven?”

“Great,” Tom laughed, “as if worrying about gangs of horny teenagers wasn't enough!”

With no direct path to either the Stones or the pond without passing the cabin and with no access from public land, you'd think keeping everything safe and private wouldn't present a serious problem. But if the deer could create a network of paths through the woods, chances are generations of determined teenagers could, too. And like many of the woods throughout New England, there were always little swamps or places where the ground gave way one had to watch out for: “Don't ever walk far off the path!”

Three paths branched off the one we could see from the kitchen windows, disappearing into the undergrowth that came within twenty feet of the back porch and left little space for a decent yard. With the cabin built on a ledge, the crest of the hill rose sharply, protection from north winds and blowing snow.

“The Stones are a little further up the side of the hill – not far. If you look down into the valley, you might not be able to see the pond from there any more. It'll depend how full the leaves are this early or how tall the trees have grown over the past fifty-some years.”

He warned us not to expect too much. “When I was a kid, I'm sure those stones were huge, but now, I'm wondering just how big they might be, given the tricks memory plays.”

For that matter, he wondered if the pond hadn't dried up and disappeared by now or become just a leaf-clogged mud-hole. It was only a small spring-fed pond, he recalled, bone-chilling cold until late-July. An old farmer's dam across the one end will have to be checked; it might've failed decades ago with no maintenance.

“Even if the pond's completely accessible, it's going to be far too cold for any swimming at this time of year!” Completely surrounded by trees, it barely got some overhead sun during the summer.

Tom assured us, if everything checks out and what needs to be fixed can be, we were both welcome to come back in the late-summer for “a proper, pond-worthy vacation.”

“Yes, please!” Cameron nodded.

But now, we needed to get ready if we're going for a walk. Tom was eager to show us the Stones.

“Cameron, why don't you use the bathroom first?” Tom put his old blue bowl in the sink and began washing it. “Just don't hog all the hot water. Leave some for the old guys.”

Even his robe couldn't hide Tom's thinness from view, hunched over the sink. Slippers and baggy fleece pajamas didn't help, either.

From beyond the edge of the side yard, Tom wondered if he hadn't heard the voices of children in the distance. “Probably some more ghosts, I imagine, cosmic echoes of the distant past.”

Seeing Tom in the sunlight of a bright new day, now that he'd gotten some rest, hadn't quite erased the sadness of my initial impressions from our conversation in the dark of the night. I can't say it did, maybe only confirmed it, as he still looked old and tired, perhaps justifiably so, after all.

Given last summer's heart attack, then being abducted by evil music extremists while becoming the prime suspect in no less than three murders before – almost as soon as he'd been rescued – suffering a stroke, Tom Purdue certainly earned the right to look like an old man who'd endured an awful lot and experienced too much. His mind was probably in the midst of distant recollections, picking up forgotten reverberations left over from those childhood visits when he had neither care nor idea about whatever the future had in store.

“What is left to look forward to when there's no 'forward' left,” he'd wondered last night, “no future to move toward? Perhaps hoping I'll feel better tomorrow is enough of a goal, these days.” There was no purpose to his life now, nothing worth doing, except tick the days off the calendar, one by one. “Isn't it just all downhill from here, after taking us so long to reach the peak, if we ever did? Now, just a slow fade to forgetfulness and death – for Sisyphus, one last time.”

Anyone who'd heard those remarks would have thought them pessimistic, maybe downright depressing, but they made perfect sense to my ear, a realistic assessment of our earlier conversations triggered by passing on a legacy. Had it seemed like wisdom to us then, the acceptance of the inevitable? But now it only made me feel older.

“O excellent, I love long life – better than figs!” I'd pulled up a chair, my legs stretched out toward the fire, a far more soothing view than facing the dark emptiness beyond his windows.

“Sit, Charmian,” he said, smiling broadly, “for a Roman thought hath struck me.”

“To sleep out this great gap of time?”

“Ah, salad days, when I was green in judgment: cold in blood, to say as I said then! What think you?”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Oh, sorry,” breaking character, “wrong play...”

Tom sat back and laughed. “No points for you, then – it's also misquoted...”

“What, no bonus point for the modulation? Zounds!”

Invariably, as Dueling Shakespeare Quotes deteriorated, we quickly started making up our own.

“Then dare you be so gauche, forsooth, to sit upon my left side?”

“Adroit as e'er for one who's ever right!”

It must have been thirty years ago we'd last “sparred with the bard,” sitting in some Broadway restaurant before a concert, his piano trio ending the program, some songs of mine starting it off. Or was it the night before, after a final rehearsal at some nearby studio around the corner from Carnegie's recital hall? At the time, we thought the whole world was finally ready for us, except no critics came and very few friends.

“So long ago, Terry – what happened to the 'Hopeful We' from back then?”

He'd mentioned before about that letter, how he'd inherited the cabin through distant cousins on his mother's side of the family. If it was a total surprise to him, it came at a good time as he recuperated from the stroke, still living in his aunt's house after all that business a couple months earlier. Even when we were in school, Tom had been proud his mother had originally come from “good New England stock,” which sounded like his genealogy was nothing more than a cattle farmer's breeding program. The cabin had been built some years before the Civil War but he'd only mentioned childhood cousins he'd known like Cousin Burt, except maybe once in passing the family matriarch, called only “Cousin Emaline.” The name meant nothing to me then, but now there's a vague stirring: I mean, how many Emalines could there be?

The children he heard playing in the yard were no doubt echoes from those distant childhood visits of sixty years ago, running through the woods with Burt, the one closest to him in age. It hadn't been every summer, and never more than a week or two's vacation, because there wasn't room enough for everyone. Tom's mother was only Uncle Max's second cousin, dismissed as a distant relation, but her mother – Tom's maternal grandmother[n-d] had been a favorite of “Old Cousin Emaline” which, among her descendents, counted for something.

But after his mother died when Tom was ten, his father couldn't stand being around them that last summer, going up for a pre-arranged holiday to get away from recent memories and sudden loss. He'd viewed their concerns as meddling; maybe he'd found this family of lumber barons a little too uppity for his taste.

So, after that summer, they never went back. Tom kept in “scarce touch” with Burt only occasionally, making one more trip when Burt, to his surprise after Uncle Max's funeral, found himself the heir. After that, the cabin stood empty during the winters, only infrequent visitors except for a month at the height of summer.

Despite the inconvenience, Burt hung on to the place, never thinking of selling. Ironically, through some strange fate, all those other cousins were gone now, and the house and its memories belonged to Tom.

Those calendars Tom had hung in every room of the cabin, years we ourselves would have few memories of, were like portals into Tom's own past as it intersected with the cabin's larger history. If he'd been here as a baby before he could remember, the last of these calendars was his last summer here. Another groan escaped from the woodwork and I wondered if generations weren't the equivalent of “dog years” in a house's life, seven generations sheltered under these beams, like Tom's decades now showing their age.

In memory's instant replay, I saw him again, no longer the young man I'd remembered, struggle up from his recliner and I'd resisted that temptation to help, knowing he needed to fend for himself. Once-long blond hair was now close-cropped and white; the twinkle in the blue eyes, sadly at times the smile, had faded.

“It's one thing in the house,” he'd begun, the worry of every old person living alone, what'd happen if he should fall, “since Mrs. Danvers comes every other weekday and on alternate Saturday mornings.” Once he finally stood up and checked his balance, he straightened his back. Acclimated by a few tottery steps forward, he accepted the fact if anything happened to him, she'd find him “soon enough. It's still difficult to walk on uneven ground. So if I fell somewhere outside in the woods? Well, who knows when...”

This-Morning Tom interrupted Last-Night Tom as we walked into the dining room. “So many things I need to say – preferably alone.” An old cardboard box sat on an arm chair opposite the dining table.

“I didn't bring Cameron along to be my driver. Anything you want to say can be said in front of him.”

There'd been plenty of time last night if he needed to talk “alone,” but I suspect he wasn't really ready yet.

“He's a good kid.” Tom nodded his approval. “You're very lucky, you know.”

For the moment, I let that hang as a rhetorical question, whatever he was implying or what I'm used to inferring. If he was referencing Cameron's relationship to me, now was not the time. I also didn't want to remind him, if that wasn't it, of Susan, the death of their daughter, or the divorce.

Usually, Tom was not an emotional guy and whenever things started turning sentimental between us, he would become even more awkward. I knew, after last night, the last thing he wanted was a hug.

“Tom, whenever you're ready – I'm here. And Cameron's here, too. We can both help you,” trying not to sound too sappy.

“Something else I found while going through the closets upstairs,” Tom said, side-stepping the obvious, “is this box. The place had been thoroughly cleaned and orderly when I moved in, so this was unexpected.”

He picked it up very carefully. The cardboard box I thought was old held a dusty, even older-looking wooden box inside, its clasp once tied with a piece of faded ribbon once probably red.

“I had to cut it, unfortunately, since it was already too brittle to untie the bow. It would easily have disintegrated.”

He placed it on the table and sat in the chair he'd used at dinner last night, carefully raising the lid to reveal a pile of hand-written music inside, a folded letter on top.

“I wasn't sure what it was,” he said, half-whispering, “but where could hand-written music manuscripts have come from, in this family?” He unfolded the letter, dated October 10th, 1908, signed by Emaline Norton Hyde.

= = = = = = =

to be continued...

©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train