Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Chapter Two



    The salmon was good, and so were the potato salad, the green salad, and the wine that Deirdre’s father kept pouring, mostly for the adults, but also with a modest quantity for the girls. And as soon as supper was over, the girls left the dining room for the piano, to keep on at the drills Paul had begun to show them. “You don’t have to sing all the time,” Paul said. “In fact as soon as something is either too stressful or boring you stop and go looking for the heart of the matter again. But sing the numbers some of the time. And slowly, so they start sticking in your head.”
   
    “They’re so eager!” Sadie Blakeley said. “You’d really think they were headed for the beach, or off to catch the ferry at Nanaimo for a week in Vancouver. How do you do it? What do you know that Iris McCallum doesn’t know? You should have heard the pair of them going on when they were helping me with supper. At first when Deirdre started singing your praises I was afraid it might be just because you were a man, and after their years with the nuns they were just being swept along by the novelty. But then she started explaining your method – including the singing, which I’d never heard of – so I settled down and started to think you must be for real in your own right, in spite of the fact that Iris is thought of as as good as you can get north of Victoria. But Deirdre insists she won’t go on without you, and only you. She says your teaching styles are too different and she’s not interested in shuttling back and forth. And I have a feeling that she’s right. Iris does have an imperious streak, not without justice either, because she does know a great deal. And plays very well herself. But if you take her you’ll have to take Maggie too. They’re quite inseparable these days and you know what girls are at that age. It would break both their hearts to know that Deirdre was having the time of her life and Maggie was in some sort of sweat shop. Their language, not mine. Will you take them both? We’ll certainly make it worth your while. You should have heard them! It’s almost too bad that Adam was home early, so you weren’t sitting with us.” She laughed. “Or maybe it’s just as well. Do you have trouble with your ego?”
   
    “Not on the subject of music,” Paul said. “ It’s so much a third and fourth generation thing in our family, and then there’s the influence of friends of the family. And my grandfather really did make some great discoveries as to method. He’s devoted to philosophy as well as music, and he had been a school teacher, so he was habitually thinking out teaching problems in reference to the lowest common denominator on a blackboard in front of a bunch of kids he would have to keep interested.”
  
     “Yes, but I don’t think Iris has ever heard of your grandfather. And neither had I as far as the music is concerned. Did he ever publish a music text? I actually have some of his other work, his books on Our Lady in particular, but I didn’t know about the music. How am I going to break the news to Iris? She’s always had such great hopes for Deirdre making it right through the conservatory schedule. Maggie’s not been at it so long.” She looked at her husband. “Adam, how am I going to do it?” She looked back at Paul, across the table and on her husband’s right. “I hate hurting people’s feelings.”
   
    “The conservatories are part of the problem,” Paul said. “My mother has to deal with this all the time. And it’s a vicious circle, all kept whirling twenty feet off the ground by masses of paperwork. Paper music, paper tests, paper accreditation by paper happy adjudicators, and all of this because the world hates Thomas Aquinas, so it doesn’t read what he says, and Kant and the Enlightenment came along just as printing started to get cheaper, thus mass produced, therefore profitable. What my grandfather realized – and your Deirdre just as quickly when she heard the results floating out over the playground this afternoon – was that the sound of music and the head and heart can all work together very well, thank you, without any need of print. And it makes very good sense, of course. Once upon a time there was no paper and no alphabet either, but there was still music, handed on through the oral tradition. In the cave, around the campfire, out on the hillside from shepherd man to shepherd boy. But once paper and schools came into it, then the teachers had something on paper to show the parents and the parents had something on paper to relate to and the kids were stupefied by a system. It’s not all bad, of course, because the child and the piano and sound are all realities, and a certain degree of perseverance gets you somewhere. Tell Iris I found Deirdre wonderfully prepared, so well set up that I can consider her qualified to start apprenticing to Maman, and that can lead her to connections in the musical world that cannot possibly come from a mere conservatory. I’m talking impresarios, record companies, film producers. And not just in Canada. Britain, the States, Europe. But the people I know won’t touch her if she doesn’t know how to operate away from the book. I don’t think Mrs. McCallum would want to interfere with anyone’s opportunity to better herself. And that Maggie should tag along has to be assumed. Iris McCallum was a young girl once.” He sighed. “But of course adults do have a way of forgetting their childhood. Pity, but it does happen.”
   
    “What did Aquinas say?” asked Adam Blakeley. He poured more wine all around as he spoke. "By the way, if you ever get tired of teaching, our sales department could use a man like you. You could sell lumber to the Swedes. Sadie had me waffling there for a moment, because we’re very fond of Iris and grateful for her efforts so far. I can’t imagine Deirdre without the music training she’s acquired to this point. But what did Aquinas say and why is he ignored, especially when the better mouse trap rule must apply to the music publishing industry?”
   
    “It might apply if Grandpere had put all his method down on paper. But he never has, so far at least. He just talks to whomever listens to him, but as he’s such a mystic not everyone, even artists and teachers, maybe especially artists and teachers, can hang in there that long for a full explanation. Aquinas said, right at the beginning of the Summa, that music is a branch of arithmetic. I don’t think this was at all original, I think he was simply following the Greeks and the oral tradition of music since. But the principle, saith Philippe, got lost after Kant. Neo-Platonism, you see, the will to create a system, a model, which is too much in the mind and not enough in the more difficult – but more rewarding – complexities of reality. Things look good on paper, especially for people who’ve never completely learned to trust reality, who’ve never had the intuition of being. Kant didn’t, saith Maritain, thus the trouble. That’s a very short digest, of course, but it’s a very big part of the heart of the problem. But your daughter is very real. You should have seen her marching in, with an ally, mind you, to find out what was going on in her classroom-to-be. She’d obviously had her intuition firing on all cylinders. I take it she must be one of the class leaders?”
  
     “Yes,” Sadie said. “Sometimes I think the nuns put too much on her shoulders in just that way.”
  
     “It’s a temptation. I especially watched my older brother have to deal with it. Same sort of fallacy in leadership of the adults. Looking for a system instead of dealing with each individual. People were always trying to get Jacob to lead. And then when he really comes up with something genuinely worth following, they turn away. But those are other stories for other times. At hand, if Deirdre likes my system, that should go a long way with the rest of the class, to say nothing of the staff, especially if they think so much of her. Anything new is always a hard sell, and the more valuable it is, the stronger the opposition. I won’t mind the help.”
  
     “Oh, there are all sorts of good kids in her class. A teacher with your energy and intelligence should have an excellent time. But who does your mother know?”
   
    “All sorts of people. Peers, here and back east. Old friends, old students. Her first love and sense of responsibility is the liturgy. She’d aim Deirdre at the Church first of all, and that’s what should cut the ice with Iris McCallum, but I never presume the liturgy as the carrot, so I threw in the other professional world. But I’m not bluffing. I know one very rising producer and one very talented composer in more or less my generation. A little older, but close enough to be persuaded to take a look at her. If Iris gets sticky, just drop the name of Michael Thurman on her If she considers herself at all on the cultural cutting edge she should know who he is. He filmed Glenn Gould for the CBC the last time he was in Vancouver.”
    
    "Good heavens!” Sadie said. “I know that name. You know him?” She stared at him more closely.  “You’re a friend of his?”
   
    “He use to stick his long legs under our dinner table on a regular basis when he was a student and best chums with my older brother. All the most significant things he knows about music he learned in and through our household. Same with Nick Taylor, the composer, amidst other responsibilities. Michael would like Deirdre’s energy very much. I mean, she’ll possibly decide she wants to become a bush pilot, or a fashion designer. Who knows what kids are going to grow up to be? But you go with the energy of the moment, so long as it isn’t destructive, and for the moment her energy for what I happen to know, rather uniquely, unfortunately, is worth looking after. And, fortunately, I do know how to do it.”
   
     Adam spoke up. “Did I not read, or see something from Toronto with Thurman’s name on it, that tells me he’s in Toronto?”

    “Yes. That should impress Iris all the more. And he may be leaving there for bigger pastures not too long from now. And wherever Michael goes, so goes the best in music. He has that kind of understanding of what it’s all about, no matter where it came from and where it’s going. His problem is that he can’t get that many musicians who understand as he does. Maman has never had a lot of students that turn pro. Happy housewives are her priority. And now and again a church organist.”
  
     “Then there’s no problem,” Sadie said happily. “I’ll simply drop her a note, thanking her for the past and explaining the present. I can hear my brain ticking creatively as I speak. But she will be disappointed. I hope we haven’t made an enemy.”
   
    “Every teacher has to try to qualify herself as much as possible. It was when my grandfather realized that Maman - her name is Yvonne – would probably become a music teacher that he got concerned about her qualifications. I mean the real qualifications, not just the paper certificates. He’d been very happy and useful as a classroom teacher himself, so he had a pretty good idea for spotting the false pedagogy, the busywork and so on. He didn’t want her caught up in that, so she became something of a guinea pig, you could say, and they learned how to do it right together. Basically she’d tell him what she didn’t like about her assignments, or what she was being taught, and he found ways to make things make sense. Or cut them out altogether.”
   
    “Did he make enemies of her teachers?”
  
     Paul chuckled, a touch grimly. “In a sense, my grandfather was always making enemies, in his own quiet way. He simply always knew the right way to go about something. Or if he didn’t know he damn well soon find out. He loves the truth. And in fact he can’t really do otherwise, because he’s a mystic. He’s always had a real backbone, and no one ever gets to bend it out of shape. But his enemies have always had a hell of a problem, because he sang so well in Church, and anywhere else he might perform, and played the violin so beautifully, that it’s hard to hate him. You really have to be quite perverse.”
  
     “From what the girls were saying,” Adam said, “It sounds like those qualities have trickled down.”
   
    “I’ve just been well trained.” Paul laughed again. “I can never get Maman’s face out of my mind when I’m doing music. Or hearing the things she says. Music is like that. In spite of all the feeling that’s in good music, the whole business relies so much on technique that you realize it really is a very conservative art, for all that you might dig jazz or Schoenberg. Fingering is utterly mathematical, voice culture is pure physiology and sound frequency. Assuming, of course, that you actually can love what you’re studying. The horrors happen when teachers and performers forget the math and the physics. To the modern beginner this probably sounds very dull and pedantic, until they hear it work. Like the girls did. Of course I was having a good time. I never do not have a good time. I play what I like and I like what I play. But I can only say that because I was so well schooled and I know what it takes, all it takes, to approach something new.”
  
     “Blackfish Bay must be something new for you, if you have always spent so much time in the city,” Adam said. “Growing up, university and all that.”
   
    “I was a little fellow in a smaller place, and I spent my student summers on the tugs. I know how to survive in small numbers.”
   
    Sadie looked at him thoughtfully. “Interesting that you say that, Paul, because I’ve been wondering about you surviving all by yourself in that house the parish owns. I don’t know why I’ve been minding your business, but it has crossed my mind several times since I heard of your appointment that I did not seem happy to think of your living by yourself. The only tug boats I know of that have just one man aboard are those little fellows that bump and bash and herd their way around the booms. All the hauling boats have a crew as far as I know.”
  
     “Yes, they do. In fact I was for a time on a tug so big it had a mess room with a piano in it. I’ve thought of that problem myself. I’m not sure that I’m a hermit, but I suppose I’ll get a chance to find out. It’ll give me lots of time for reading and painting. And it saves the parish money if I don’t have to pay rent elsewhere.”
  
     “Actually, that’s not necessarily so,” said Adam. Knowing his wife, he also had a pretty good idea of where her thoughts were taking her. “If the parish rented the house to the current market it could make a little money for itself, so long as you weren’t in it, of course.”
  
     Paul could see that Sadie looked pleased with her husband. “Exactly,” she said. “If you stayed with us, the parish could rent the cabin out. Deirdre would have you for a few essential moments every day – if that was all right with you – and I wouldn’t have to worry about you being all by yourself down on the shore below the highway.”
  
     Paul looked carefully at both of them. “You’re inviting me to live here?”
   
    “Why not, unless you don’t think we’d be good company? The older kids re scattering, so you would actually have a choice of rooms. And we hardly need to charge you for your keep so you could make something of the little salary that Father is paying you. We know what it is, Paul. Even from the little we heard about you from Father and the sisters we knew you were worth at least as much as the government pays public school teachers, if not more. We’re not quite the household that you’ve come from, I’m sure, but we would love to have you with us if that’s all right with you.”
  
     From the living room came some very respectable interpretation, on the resident piano, of the afternoon’s lesson. Three, five one; three, five, one; then, three, six, one; three, six, one. The tonic major triad, then the relative minor triad. Well, minor according to the sixth. “Hmm.” Paul said. “There is a problem with the cabin on the beach, as romantic as it may sound. It doesn’t have a piano. Your house does. But that might make me a pest.”
  
     “I don’t think so,” Sadie said. “I’m quite used to children practicing. Almost a couple of decades of it, actually. And from what I hear, your method would be quite worth listening to. What the girls are doing now: I take it that’s a part of it? I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a thing before. Have you talked with Father McKeon about the cabin? You must have. By the way, when did you get here?”
  
     “Yesterday afternoon. My father drove me over. He hasn’t been on the Island for a while,nor had he and my mother been off by themselves for a while. I assume they had a nice trip home. Father McKeon and I had dinner together last night and I stayed at the rectory, as the cabin was not to be available until the beginning of September. Father thinks I can become a kind of catechism centre for the working youth of Blackfish Bay, and that would solve any problems of loneliness, but I’m actually quite fond of my own company and grab all the time for painting that I can, so the cabin seemed ideal at first glance. But I’d actually started to get second thoughts, oddly enough turning around the keyboard, although of course there is one at the school. Right in my classroom in fact. But there’s also one here, and a very eager student of it in Deirdre. It’s an ideal situation for both of us. Makes me feel like an old fashioned governess, who gave lessons every day. I suspect, however, that few governesses had as students such enthusiastic performers as those two. You were mentioning ego. They would be very good for it, on those days when I felt that the class as a whole was going nowhere.”
 
     "You speak like a veteran."
  
    “Not at all, but I come from a family of teachers, and not only in the blood line. I expect I’ll have a bad day or two. Teaching, after all, is an art, and every artist knows his bleak and failing periods. Certainly I’ve had my share. And will no doubt have some more.”    “Right!” Sadie said. “You are also a painter, I have been told. That’s very exciting, especially if you paint as well as you teach music.”
  
     “I honestly hope that I will be able to paint – eventually – better than I teach music. I suppose that now they’re about equal. No, music’s better, because I’ve simply been taught all the rudiments and I think I can make them work. What I am, or will be, as a painter, remains to be seen. And I’m not really in any hurry to find my true depth. In art, I mean. The depth of musical theory I have. It’s really a science more than an art in so many ways, although of course you have to feel a certain degree of inspiration to make study a pleasant experience. Deirdre seems to have the inspiration. Now we just have to make sure she gets the science. And if I’m living under the same roof that really should happen, via the little bit every day that she needs to learn. That’s exactly what happened to Nick Taylor, you know. He moved in with us when he came back from the bush, so my mother could show him day by day as fast as he could learn. It was quite astounding how quickly he absorbed it all. But of course it was all part of a providential plot, to add that much motivation to his being willing to take on my brother’s pet project. As a writer, I mean, not as a musician.”
  
     “And what was that? And what brother? How many do you have?”
  
     “My oldest brother. Jacob. Actually, he was adopted. But that’s another story. I have younger blood brothers. Jacob was adopted into the family when he was an adolescent. His parents were killed in a car accident when they were visiting, from Ontario. My father knew his father from the war, and my parents could see that Jacob was very much taken by the household. He already had an unusually strong interest in religion, in spite of, or maybe because of, his own family. He was a natural for the spiritual life, although that always surprised people because he was also had a lot of natural gifts. My Dad always said he was a lot like Father de Smet, the Jesuit missionary in Oregon Territory, as it used to be called. Very strong physically, but also a hell of a mind. Anyway, Jake was always immensely grateful for his new home, and always seemed to have a good sense at what lay at the heart of it. And he also had a great sense of our grandfather. He soaked up his writing as well as a young fellow could, even in high school, and then began to dream of finding someone to write the stories of Philippe’s life, so it could be studied as literature, which was the subject he assumed he would teach, as our father did. Of course he teaches philosophy now, and is very happy with that, and awfully good at it, but literature was the hope of his youth and the dream of a biographer for Grandpere led him to Nick Taylor, who was, is, the natural . . . .”
  
     “So when are these stories coming out? Are any published yet? I would love to read them, as I already have some of Philippe”s books.”
  
     “Ah. You and how many others. Well, you might have to wait a while. Getting the life of a mystic down on paper as close as paper can get it is not an easy task. And I don’t think it ever occurred to Jacob when he began to envision his chronicles that in order to do the real job the author would have to go through the same experiences as Philippe had. And that takes time. Years of time. So Nick just has to putter along with the natural or the ordinary events of grace as best he can. But that’s not to be sneezed at. The last time I heard from him he was writing a hymn which I just might be trying out with Deirdre’s class, once they get the hang of a few fundamentals. He composes quite well, actually, so you want to get it right.”
  
     “You won’t be disappointed if I admit that I don’t really know what a mystic is, and I know that I don’t understand everything, or perhaps even very much of what your grandfather says? But I always feel better, I feel I’ve come closer to God, when I am in one of his books. I always feel . . . oh, an immense trust that he knows what he’s talking about.”
   
    “He would be delighted to know just that. I must admit that I have a certain sense of what a mystic is because I’ve lived with some. But it’s an outside view, not something I understand from within. What you see from the outside is something that is completely natural, so natural you sometimes wonder if religion is an element in their lives, in the way that so many people try to be religious, and then other times there’s something away more significant than mere nature, if only because it seems to have so much certainty, so much authority. The Sanhedrin hated Jesus, and I’ve known professors – and students – who were not very fond of my father. Priests, too, sadly enough . . .
And Grandpere always has enemies in the highest places. So many people have authority problems, or want to wallow in doubt. And my mother is an incredible music teacher. She’s always pulling people out of the most ridiculous holes. But every once in a while someone will simply refuse to realize that music is a science as well as an art and just can’t accept her authority in the matter. To tell you the truth, I often wonder if Nick might not have missed the cut if he hadn’t been so well prepared by Jacob and Mike Thurman. Nick’s said that himself, too, but maybe he was just having a kind of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ realizations. He was enormously lucky, actually, but of course God did give him a good deal of raw talent that I suppose He felt he had to look after, so Providence stuck our family in his path.”
  
     “And now Providence has stuck you in our path,” Adam said.
  
     At that point there came a sound from the living room so arresting that the adults all stopped talking to listen. The girls had discovered how to sing a scale in thirds using numbers. The force of the simplicity, combined with their unmistakable confidence, was as overwhelming to the sensitive heart as good children’s music can be. Both parents beamed with delight at the quality of the sound, and as if sensing the approval – or perhaps they heard the dinner table go quiet – and screened by the invisibility behind the wall, the girls swanked out their new skill profoundly
   
     It was a full minute before Sadie asked Paul if he knew exactly what they were doing.
  
     “I think they’ve taken out a scale book, and they’re doing the double thirds on the treble staff. It's a good exercise as they're doing it but it will be better once they here it integrated in a way the scale books do not seem to have thought of.  They just have to change three of those thirds to fourths. Then the exercise will really make sense."      
   
     “But they’re so confident! Maggie actually has a lovely voice - very clear, light, and high - but she’s usually quite shy. It takes a lot to bring her out. Deirdre of course is rather like a cart horse, like me. She just charges ahead so things get done.”
  
     “Yes, like insisting I come home with them for supper. But of course McKeon had already told me a lot about this house, so I knew another plate when the entré had already been decided on would as easy as in our house. Besides, the Blakeley’s were somewhat known to me I think before McKeon. Through my oldest sister, Celine. Or Catherine as she’s known in the order. She’s the reason I’m here. Well, the connection. Moving Sister Barbara was such an event that the whole order knew about it, even the juniors.”
  
     “So that’s how you got here,” Adam said. “It was your sister who knew we were all quite perturbed to be losing the music and so she knew you could be useful in Blackfish Bay."

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