Mara, it turned out, wanted to take a walk. I missed her by a few minutes, but lost no time trying to get a rain check date. We walked down to the Isabella Stuart Gardner museum. They had concerts on Sunday afternoons. This may have been my notion. The late Don Davis had told me that Isabella Stewart had been an eccentric woman of means who'd run afoul of the Brahmins and imported an entire Italian palazzo which she plunked down at the end of the Back Bay Fens to get even. Her will, he went on to opine, forbade the moving of so much as a stick of furniture. Concerts happened in the dining room, with a table in the middle of the audience. I supposed that meant that one could be both below the salt and in the peanut gallery at the same time. I loved the Gardner palazzo, especially its courtyard, and was eager to impress a comely young woman such as Mara with my (half-baked) knowledge of fine art.
We met for our stroll on a beautiful, sunlit Sunday afternoon in mid-Fall. I told her about my ostinato piece.
"I must hear it!"
She had a wonderful way of touching my arm for emphasis when she spoke. Her voice was always well modulated, and I imagined that she would sing contralto. I never heard her sing. The idea that I might actually get her in the basement to hear the piece I always would associate with her was tantalizing. What more romantic set up could be concocted? The admiring Georges Sand on the arm of a young Chopin, ready to praise genius, ready to pledge undying love; how very seductive! Need I even mention that it did not turn out quite that way? It had not worked that way back in High School, and it would not work that way into the fog of the future. Nevertheless, that hope sprang unbidden perpetually to my mind. To flog the defunct equine, in later life I observed a marriage founded on such genius-worshiping foolishness. The fellow even required his wife to call him "master." The nausea cannot be suppressed. It lasted a surprisingly long while, because the woman found herself in inescapable servitude, of course. But eventually, it did blow up. I was around, not to pick up pieces so much as to jeer. I get way ahead of ourselves as we stroll innocently (or not) to the Gardner Museum on a crisp New England Fall Sunday.
"How did you become interested in dance?"
"Oh, like many girls, my parents took me to lessons as a kid."
"You took to it, obviously."
"No. Actually, I hated it. I...was awkward and gawky-geeky. And maybe a little fat."
"Fat? I don't believe it."
"Believe it. I'm more a bookworm, maybe a tomboy. I got interested in dance for real when I read a bio of Martha Graham."
"We sound so much alike. I saw a movie about Beethoven once and thought that sounded like a good life."
"Great life. Deaf, lonely..."
"I don't know. In his younger days, don't you think he 'got the girls hot?'"
"Certainly. Nothing gets a girl hot like deaf guys playing piano. All I can think of is Shroeder from Charlie Brown."
"Yeah. I love the way they put the notes in that strip. Bogus music, on coffee cups..."
We passed the Museum School, Boston Museum of Fine Art. She again touched him and pointed at the facade.
"Iconic."
"We enter the bowers of art."
"You speak so eloquently. You should be a writer."
"An easier game than music, for sure."
"Or dancing!"
As we spoke these words, we did not yet know how reliant an artist must be on the written justification. I still thought I'd take the world by storm in a concert hall just a half a mile from where we walked. In his flattery, Don Davis had encouraged me to think this way. Still ahead for us were strolls through museums where all that manifested as art was a brochure and a pallet of blank sheets of paper. Little did we know yet of the insurrections going on at the Museum School.
At last we arrived at the Palazzo. We gravitated to the Botticelli.
"You look so much like a Boticelli woman."
"Flattery will get you...nowhere, but if you mean broad in the beam, you're really dying on the vine.
"No, I mean Italianate. Voluptuous."
"Big ass. You can't win. I'm a nice Catholic girl."
We stared at the marble in the courtyard. Mara had a thing for St. Francis. She swore she could see him in the marble, feeding his birds. I mused about the trouble with Catholic girls, but I was to be proven wrong about this.
The concert was fascinating. We were early, so we got good seats. We were well above the salt. The bill featured a woman playing a recital. The recital started with the apparently obligatory Chopin set. She played a bunch of Nocturnes, dripping with the customary rubato. I was already opposed to this practice, having heard Don Davis go on about 'the left hand keeping time and the right hand doing what it could.' Don always backed up his pontifications with facts: we heard Ignaz Friedman play these pieces with absolute clarity and authority. The pianist moved on to some finger buster by Liszt. Somewhere in the middle of this sprawling noise she began to improvise, and then, to falter. She stopped dead in her pianistic tracks. She began again, but it was no use. At length, having stopped again, she rose for the bench and clattered out of the dining hall, her high heels sounding like little pistol shots as she left us aghast in her wake. Mara looked at me with big brown eyes and shook her head slowly. As budding performers ourselves, we felt bad. But the woman returned after a few minutes and announced she'd go right on to the Bach. She tore through the "Italian Concerto" (a great choice for the Gardner!) at a good crisp clip. This return to the platform and subsequent aplomb led to a big hand at the end.
It was now just past nightfall. We strolled back to the dorms in a quieter mood. We'd flirted plenty, and now we simply were together. As we neared our destination, I slowed in slight uncertainty.
"Wanna come in and hear the piece?"
"Maybe another night. I've got to study and be up early for class."
Mara backed away down the stoop of the old Fenway mansion that housed us boys, and turned like a dancer, with muted drama, in the direction of the girls' palace. I'd been a perfect gentleman. I'd kept my rattlings-on about things I only dimly understood to a minimum. I felt good, warm in the cool air. I watched her disappear into the evening murk, her white dress glowing after her skin had dissolved in the street light. I stood alone on the steps. I looked over at my little white shit box car, parked under a tree on the fens side. I thought of home, of driving back to DC for Thanksgiving. I thought, at last, of my own need to hit the books. I went in and did that for awhile. My roommates called for a lights out after a few jokes about how fast I could move when Mara came calling. 'Maybe another night' rattled around in my brain as I fell off to sleep.
