In the previous installment, Tom describes the events of March, 1983, when a composer from that Iowa artists' colony he'd been staying at disappeared, apparently wandering off into this intense blizzard after the bus they were riding in became stranded in the town of Orient. His name was Phillips Hawthorne, a young man who called himself "Trazmo," an anagram of Mozart. Nobody liked him and nobody thought his disappearance was more than a mystery for the local police to figure out.
His body was never found, and there was no evidence of "foul play." So, once the roads were opened and the bus could leave the Express Motel behind, there'd still been no sign of him. But a year later, after the film Amadeus was released, a reporter in the region, Mickey McRaker, got hold of the story after the composer's father produced a letter which gave rise to the theory perhaps someone from the Colony, one who'd been on the same bus, might have, you know, murdered him? The letter happened to mention one in particular his son dubbed "Little Tommy Tuneless," and, as McRaker pointed out, which composer on the bus was named Thomas?
Thomas Purdue, of course. And suddenly, Tom finds himself haunted by accusations that perhaps he'd "done in" young Hawthorne in a fit of professional jealousy, rumors that have haunted him ever since.
And now, a TV show called "Great American Cold Cases" has picked up the story, threatening to open everything up again. As reluctant as he is to do it, Tom asks his old friend if he and Cameron couldn't look into the matter and clear his name.
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[Chapter 5, continued...]
We are told, despite the convictions of science-fiction writers and fans of fantasy, it is impossible to travel back in time. Those of us who have had the opportunity to experience it – myself and Cameron at various times and in different ways – might disagree with the scientific community, but it's not something we'd argue about. What if we'd walked through Tom's front door: would I believe maybe (somehow) we'd just stepped back in time, a more recent time, not one decades ago when life was pleasant and less complicated?
Instead, we entered the kitchen by the less formal back door where the microwave, the wall-mounted telephone, and the old-fashioned refrigerator's calendar spoke of a time more than a few decades in the past. I helped Tom put away the breakfast dishes; Cameron thought about the future of lunch and busied himself with the coffeepot.
“Didn't Mrs. Danvers say she stops by just to check in on Sundays,” Cameron said, “on her way home from church?” He lifted some china cups, fancier than the others, down from the cupboard. “I doubt she'd be very pleased to find out you'd spent Church Time back at the Standing Stones, now, would she?”
“It's Sunday...?” Tom stopped, momentarily confused, looking askance at the calendar which wasn't marked to show which day it was. “Right...”
Hadn't we discussed it earlier? Maybe he's forgotten. I glanced carefully at Cameron.
“She probably won't bother to stop by, then,” Tom said, “since you guys are here. There're enough meals to heat up for several days; besides, she'd given the place a thorough cleaning on Friday.”
Initially, Tom enjoyed listening to Mrs. Danvers often acerbic account of the latest town news until eventually the novelty wore off.
“Some days, I don't have to say a thing,” he explained. “Other days, she's on the quiet side, so I'd just go putter around in the study or take a nap while she cleans. Funny what retirement does to you, no way of saying 'if I'm teaching this class this morning, it must be Tuesday'.”
“True, but at least Mondays don't seem so dreadful any more,” I laughed.
Without dropping a beat, he looked out the window and asked, “So, what'll we do this afternoon? Check out the sights?”
Tom was now in his mid-sixties – the same age as me – and I couldn't see him as only an older version of the Tom I knew from Faber when we were in our early-20s. Cameron had told me after dinner, seeing us side by side, he would've assumed Tom was ten years older than me. But he knew Tom recently had a heart attack and a stroke, had also been kidnapped and nearly killed, all in the space of five or six months: all that aged a man significantly. Instead, I needed to accept he'd become another person, despite glimpses of the humor, the glint in his eye, or the recognizable cadence of his speech, with everything filtered through the veneer of years. As he stood in front of the window, was I imagining the Faber student now seen through the haze of cataracts?
In one of those flashes too easily dismissed as an epiphany, I recalled the first time I'd heard a recording of one of Stravinsky's late works with its stringent, angular style – wasn't it Threni? Despite the fuss about his becoming a serialist, there was a chord straight out of the neo-classic Violin Concerto, or some texture hinting at a passage from The Rite of Spring, still recognizably Stravinsky. Likewise, lost among these unfamiliar, shadowy impressions, I noticed unmistakeable traces of the younger Tom I'd never mistake for anyone else.
But what if Trazmo had not gone missing on that night in Iowa? How might he have survived being a prodigy? By then, Hawthorne was well past an acceptable age for a Boy Wonder. He would've been the same age then Tom and I had been as grad students, not that we were ever prodigies. That would've made him, what, ten years younger? Not much of an age difference now, proportionally, if he's in his late-50s. Back then, of course, it was more like we were from different generations.
Did he, as Trautman implied, simply walk away from everything, his potential, his seemingly predestined future, what might have been his inevitable fame, all because he was no longer able to handle the pressure? Naturally, I'd assumed he's alive unlike everyone else who apparently considered him dead. Isn't that what he'd want everyone to think?
Trazmo. I had the same sense of frustration Cameron mentioned, wishing I could think of him more by his real name. Calling him “Hawthorne” made sense but “Trazmo,” like a brand, came so effortlessly. He'd not been such a part of my life before that reconnecting with him warranted the familiarity of his preferred nickname. What was it the family had used before he created his musical persona? I think Tom said they called him “Pip.” (Did hawthorns even have pips?) Since I'd never met him, “Hawthorne” should suffice.
I've known Tom personally since the day we met in Faber's registration line, knew him when he had started teaching at Tansonville College along the Wabash, happily settled into a picturesque suburb called Vivonne. What if, that day in Iowa, he'd decided to wait out the storm till the Spirit Lake airport would open again? How different would his life have been all these years since had he and Trazmo parted ways before getting on that bus? Was this arbitrary conjunction an event setting both their futures in motion?
In London, I'd recalled Henry Joyce's quip, how he had lost his creative powers: “I had a brilliant future behind me.” Would what happened to Tom have happened regardless, a hand predestined by Fate? An artist's psyche was such a delicate thing, couldn't pulling one supporting block from this fragile tower cause everything to crumble?
What “arbitrary conjunctions” here connected Tom (and by vicarious separations, Cameron and me) to some earlier inhabitants of this very spot? Imagine Tom as a child of ten, stretching up to grab a cookie. How old was Cousin Emaline when she died; how long ago had it been since she cooked her last dinner here? What about the man everyone called Jack who had somehow become her husband, an ambivalent composer and apparently a bitter cripple? Did he sit here in his wheelchair, eating what she cooked, never smiling?
It was difficult to believe – imagine explaining it to a thoroughly skeptical world – I had met not just John Knowles Paine but two of his composition students who, somehow, I now shared this confluence of space and time with, 130 years later, composers who, despite their teacher's best efforts, never managed to fulfill their dreams.
Whatever fed Emaline Norton's childhood wish to write songs that could become famous when sung by Cousin Lily, soon to become the opera star Lilian Nordica, simple desire couldn't replace a lack of talent. But Paine told me she had the drive and the willingness to work at it which could unlock such a talent. It was challenging enough being a girl with such a dream in a world that believed women couldn't possibly write music. But he admired her commitment and found her efforts more promising than many.
Hyde, with his self-assurance, expected to become a famous composer merely because he'd studied with one, the way a son inherits his father's business or the family fortune regardless of his worth or merit. Just as women couldn't run a company or become wealthy without marrying into it, women weren't cut out to be composers. Yet I remember his teacher telling Hyde, that distant night with the Kapellmeister at my side, a little more of Miss Norton's sense of hard work would not go amiss in his own lessons.
A handsome man with his high cheekbones and green eyes wearing an odd ring, a garnet embossed with a golden alto clef, Hyde, intent on Miss Norton, was keen on marrying the “lady composeréss.” Hadn't his friends joked the only way he'd get anything performed was to publish anything she'd write under his own name?
As I recalled the conversation I'd overheard, Hyde's sole reason for marrying Emaline was to save the world from another female composer, ordering her to stop composing and keeping her music from being performed, since it was “unseemly” for a well-to-do man's wife to compose music, much less have it displayed on the vulgar stage. But if he was a composer himself, wouldn't he understand what it would be like having his own creativity forcibly stifled? What could possibly have attracted her to him? Why would she marry him?
And what was it like, stuck here in this woodland isolation far removed from the intellectual and artistic stimulation of Boston? Did she get to visit friends or family there and hear some concerts? Were there other friends, fellow musicians, who came to visit, occupying her time? Were there children? Did she keep a journal?
That night we'd scoured the upper reaches of Harvard's library, the level where Paine filed Ye Olde Ten Commandments of Harmonie, Supply Belcher's elusive Codex the Kapellmeister was searching for, I'd seen Hyde's ring. It flashed past me when someone in a flowing black cape attacked us, then flew over the railing, and fell screaming. I may have been rescued by the Kapellmeister and returned home safely, but I'd wondered whatever happened to that would-be attacker. For some reason, Miss Norton had married him, but why – out of pity?
We sat around the picnic table enjoying sandwiches with Mrs. Danvers' chicken salad, our impromptu lunch in the yard, while Tom and I reminisced before clearing the dishes and Cameron pretended to look interested. Tom, tired from the morning's walk (frankly, so was I), announced he would go upstairs and maybe take an hour's nap. Cameron, telling us about this new meditation technique he'd been trying, decided to stay out in the yard and “focus” himself. It was still a beautiful day despite some clouds gathering on the horizon.
Back in the parlor, I was about to delve into Sartor resartus again after a long hiatus, when Mrs. Danvers called to apologize for not dropping in to see how “Dr. Tom” was doing.
“Oh, he's fine, Mrs. Danvers, just a little tired after our walk earlier this morning.” I didn't mention the Standing Stones.
“I'll be there tomorrow at 11:15,” she said. “Is there anything you require I should pick up at the grocery store?”
Beyond additional items for breakfast, I said we hadn't thought about it. “We're planning on driving into the village later this afternoon. Is there a grocery we could stop at – save you the trouble?”
There was a chilly silence – had I offended her? – after which she said, very much like a warning, “Cambremer's Co-Op in the village closes early on Sundays – promptly at 4:00.” Then she hung up.
It had been an uncomfortably silent walk back to the cabin, earlier, and I was afraid Tom was embarrassed, concerned he'd imposed too much on us and we'd flown over from Venice for nothing. Was he annoyed I hadn't jumped at the chance, taking on the challenge? I'd no idea even what we could do.
All I'd said was a rather tempered response which sounded like I was trying to find a way to say “No.” First, beyond making some calls, what, working within the law, could we accomplish?
I could give Agent Bond a call, ask her advice, maybe get the IMP involved, perhaps even assist them with it. Was it enough of a case to bring in the International Music Police? Whoever's jurisdiction it might be – it is, after all, a case involving composers – could they stifle the TV show's so-called investigation?
It was already Sunday evening in London, so this should wait till morning, even if the idea of bothering Bond at home on a Sunday hadn't stopped her from bothering me on a Sunday. I had also not told Tom of my plan, such as it was, until I could have thought more about it. And since Carlyle was not helping – one could take only so many of his convoluted sentences – I needed some other distraction. That's when my eyes swept across the box of Emaline's recently unearthed manuscripts.
Sifting through the box yielded nothing I hadn't noticed before, whether I might unearth a journal, perhaps, or another explanatory note. I took out her husband's Violin Sonata to give it a thorough perusal. Unfortunately, it was so bland and unimaginative, the perusal was quick and dismissive. That sketch for “The Minotaur's Gate” was different.
First of all, after the sonata's amateurish simplicity, what was so different about this piece he'd written it down in code, unless the notation was more musical shorthand than some kind of mysterious secret? There were no musical pitches, actual notes or written pitches like “A” or “C-sharp,” just strings and vertical clusters of numbers.
True, 18th Century composers used “figured bass,” a harmonic shorthand, to fill in the harmony's inner voices (leaving the realization to the keyboard player), but those reflected intervals from the bass line, not pitches.
Without pitches to refer to, to build chords – then why not use standard chord symbols like GM, D7, IV, or vi? – I assumed this must be a pitch-substitution code an atonal composer might use. Except it struck me as unlikely a mediocre Harvard student in the 1880s had evolved an early atonal system of composition. The piece Tom had already showed Cameron, a one-page “Night Piece,” was dated Spring 1886 when he'd studied with Paine, clearly not tonal with its augmented chords and frequent “illegal” tritones between the harmonies.
Just as I'd thought, it was vaguely centric, the augmented chords voiced to approximate harmonic motion, the tritones imitating dominant-to-tonic cadences. On the whole, it too looked fairly amateurish, an experiment in uncharted waters. Yet when Hyde wrote this, Charles Ives was only 11 years old and Debussy's Faun was five years in the future.
What was different between this earlier “Night Piece” and “Minotaur's Gate,” beyond a much-improved title, that required a new notational approach? Or was it just a sketch, quickly scrawled in a kind of shorthand? Since he'd left no clues here to help me solve it, it's no doubt a system he'd been quite familiar with. The numbers, none higher than 12 (the number of pitches in the chromatic scale), seem spaced across an imaginary staff which could indicate their approximate register and rhythm – in other words, space and time.
If today's standard integer notation substituted 0 for C, 1 for C-sharp, 2 for D, and so on through 11 for B-natural, did Hyde's run alphabetically, with 1 for A through 12 for G-sharp? Couldn't they also refer to their placement in some unspecified “source set” like a chord series or a primitive twelve-tone row?
Using a chord progression didn't make sense in 21st Century hindsight, nor was I willing to credit Hyde with inventing serialism. Since Middle C is the universal center, music's Greenwich Meridian, let's imagine 1=C.
Tom mentioned boxes stored in the attic: could they contain additional papers and notebooks or maybe even journals and more manuscripts? We needed to go through those soon, before I did any further work. Unless Hyde keep everything in his head. Or did Emaline destroy all traces of it, accidentally leaving these two pieces behind?
I heard Tom stirring upstairs, headed slowly toward the bathroom, at the same time I looked out and noticed Cameron had stood up, stretching his arms upward, a cat awakening from a long nap. Hunched over the table, I was reminded I needed to stretch my back, too, after sitting too long in one position. It's quite possible an hour might've gone by but I thought I'd just sat down here only a few minutes ago. I also figured I'd been the only one, meanwhile, who'd accomplished nothing productive.
Would it matter what order the papers had been in before? I slid the sketch for “Minotaur's Gate” under the bottom of the pile and hoped Tom wouldn't notice the box had been disturbed. When I sat down in the parlor again with Sartor, I felt like I was trying to hide something from him.
“You still reading that awful book?” Tom stood in the archway and stretched, rolling his back forward to “unkink” the spine. “I never could stomach Carlyle's style, all that philosophical mumbo-jumbo at the beginning. It seems he's cramming everything into it he'd found doing research – and half of it sounds like he's making it up.”
“Can't disagree with you there,” hoping he hadn't noticed I'd read less than a page since we last talked about it. His glance landed briefly on the box of manuscripts without any further comment.
“The only thing I understand, from what Terry's said,” Cameron added, walking in from the kitchen, apple in hand, “is it's a philosophical treatise on clothes that says Man is basically a naked animal.”
“By the way,” Tom laughed, as Cameron held out the apple, “forbidden fruit aside, what does anybody want for breakfast tomorrow?”
“Which reminds me,” I said, with a few stretches of my own, “Mrs. Danvers called – I asked about the local grocery...”
“Ah, I'll bet she wasn't pleased with that.”
“She did sound rather miffed.”
Mrs. Danvers, he explained, stocked all of his groceries and perhaps took my question to suggest her services had been inadequate. “She'd also have nothing good to say about Cambremer's Co-Op in the village.”
“Oh, I explained it was just that Cameron and I prefer a little more variety for breakfast than, you know, oatmeal.”
Since Cambremer's closed in an hour, Cameron was driving down the hill toward Swanville in a matter of minutes, Tom in the back seat, eager to be making a rare trip outside the cabin.
“It's one thing to talk to Mrs. Danvers – I'm not sure I'm ready to risk my life riding with her, yet.”
Once he's more sure of himself, “health-wise,” Tom looked forward to driving Burt's old Hyundai in the garage, a 1989 Sonata. Otherwise, until then, he was essentially house-bound, entirely dependent on Mrs. Danvers' generosity.
The Co-Op, little more than a roadside convenience store, stocked mostly snacks, sodas and beer along with a limited supply of frozen dinners and vegetables plus the usual processed meats, pre-packaged sandwiches and coffee-by-the-cup. Cameron located some bacon, milk, and eggs plus an overpriced box of breakfast pastries.
“I'm guessing Mrs. Danvers isn't a regular?”
If the good folks at Cambremer's Co-op regarded us suspiciously as early Summer Folk, Tom delighted in our story how we'd made that wrong turn yesterday and stopped at a gas station for directions. When I'd told the proprietor “we're searching for a place called 'Lost Time'?” he said, perfectly serious, “oh, you're already there.”
A brief detour took us across the lot to a narrow stream flowing from a small, stonework dam across the narrow base of Swan Lake.
“This must be what the locals call Goose River.”
“Seriously?” Cameron, turning a full circle, scanned the length of the horizon. “So, what happened to the rest of the town?”
“There really is no centralized town,” Tom said, a few hundred houses around the lake, scattered along roads through the woods. “Needless to say, I didn't move here for the night life.”
“Looks... pleasant...?”
And it did seem pleasant enough as we drove the long way back to the cabin, other towns not far away so we didn't feel quite so separated from the rest of the world. There was a library seven miles east, other stores and some restaurants in the seacoast towns ten miles to the south. But on his hilltop, beyond the occasional incursions from Mrs. Danvers to cook and clean, Tom was conscious of being alone. Still, he considered asking her to cut back to only twice a week.
We didn't talk about Tom's request after dinner and I didn't mention returning to Europe to resume our interrupted Italian vacation. We also tiptoed around any discussion how long Cameron and I might stay. Hours later, Cameron stood up and stretched, deciding he'd go up to bed; Tom opted to start off on his recliner.
Wide awake, I said I'd check out that box of manuscripts in the dining room, instead, avoiding mention of Hyde's piece. Tom turned out the other lights and warned, “Don't get too carried away.”
An hour later, long after Tom gave up on his book, I'd worked my way through one line of Hyde's shorthand, not sure I'd selected the best possible solution of the many possible options. Whatever Hyde intended, I didn't know what was “jotting down material (choose from these)” or what could have been “finished phrases.” Then there was the matter of rhythm, not to mention the basic structure. Were these bits of phrases or whole units? How much didn't he bother with because it was complete in his mind?
Were his pitches the result of some systematic selection or were they chosen arbitrarily, whatever he thought might have sounded good? I could see patterns, even sequences, but nothing I sensed was systematically consistent. With only this Nocturne to go by, there was little to give me any hint of what we'd call his “voice.”
It was taking me a lot of work to realize this one page, a time-consuming, frustrating process that wasn't getting easier, whether this was the complete piece or only the first of several pages. Numbers in the creases where it had been folded were harder to read, and faded ink made a magnifying glass indispensable. Some numbers were further apart than others, or a series of closely written numbers might be followed by a wider distance, perhaps a kind of “spatial notation” indicating short notes followed by longer ones.
The handwriting was cramped, as if trying to save space, and judging from the spidery nature of most of the numbers, compared to the childish confidence of his calligraphy in the earlier two pieces, I assumed writing was difficult for him, whether the result of injuries or from the pain keeping him in a wheelchair.
I'd only seen Hyde for a few minutes, my attention, understandably, focused elsewhere. How much of this am I only imagining; how much is pure inference? Am I concocting genius from absolutely zero potential? In the few years between his Harvard training and this extraordinary manifestation of originality, how could one explain such aesthetic growth?
My initial curiosity, then, would have concerned Emaline's evolution as a composer, compared to her contemporaries; Hyde might be easily dismissed. Was Hyde's indecipherable sketch an anomaly or evidence of the presence of madness?
The only reason I knew that wasn't entirely the case was the remark his teacher had made about his exposure to those late works by Liszt which he was clearly imitating in the Nocturne. What insights, technical or intuitive, ignited the leap between that student piece (and any others) and this, only six years later?
How much about the mood and tempo could I infer from the title which, if not exactly programmatic, was definitely atmospheric? Beside Liszt's emerging atonality, this sounded like Schoenberg's ground-breaking Pierrot Lunaire of 1911.
My sense of pitch was never reliable, less so with age and lack of use, so I needed to play through it at the piano to prove to my ears what I was thinking. What I heard, carefully playing through it, was even more startling than what I thought I'd heard in my mind's ear.
In the distance, from over my shoulder, I also began hearing a low, nondescript pitchless keening, some disembodied voice singing along. I stopped playing and looked up, seeing nothing; the voice itself also stopped. I turned around, expecting Tom was standing behind me, except no one was there. “Perhaps it's Tom, mumbling in his sleep?”
I sat at the piano, my back to the archway, Tom's study behind me, and resumed playing: the sound began again. “Why shouldn't it be Tom, with everything on his mind to worry about?”
Whatever it was, I saw no one else in the downstairs rooms – the last thing I needed was to find Mrs. Danvers in the doorway past midnight – and it wasn't coming from the study. I had a vivid image of my grandmother not exactly comforting me as a scared child: “You can't see around corners.”
No, now that I'm standing in the center of the house, it sounded more like it would've come from the kitchen, though I couldn't hear anything at all except for Tom's very even breathing. Reluctantly, I flicked on the kitchen light and checked the backdoor – definitely locked – but decided not to investigate that back stairway.
It's true I wasn't technically alone, but Tom was right about one thing: this place will definitely take getting used to.
Going upstairs, I sensed someone was definitely standing in the room behind me.
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©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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