Nocturne at Midnight

Six days after Deborah Digges jumped to her death in western Massachusetts, I drove to the coast of southern Maine to celebrate my dad’s ninetieth birthday. This juxtaposition of tragedy and triumph is common in midlife, framing our days with a collage of contrasts, making us sometimes as indifferent as the ploughman in Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, who pays no attention to the boy who has tumbled from the sky.

Not that my dad would be terribly broken up by the suicide of a 59-year-old poet he’d never heard of; you don’t reach your ninth decade in this vale of tears by being overly sentimental, a weepy Caspar Milquetoast. And yet Dad has not been a stranger to dark moods over his long life; as a child, I remember him playing, over and over, on a saucer-sized vinyl record on his turntable, the mournful ballad by Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…” This ditty exasperated me in the same way that “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” by Bob Dylan exasperated him, but I would never have dreamed of telling him so. (He felt no compunction about demanding that I turn off “that garbage by Bobby Die-lan,” whose last name Dad knew perfectly well how to pronounce but said wrong just to annoy me.) A few years later, when the television series M*A*S*H was all the rage, he listened obsessively to its theme song, “Suicide is Painless; it brings on many changes…”

And then there were the hardcover books that piled up on the slender end table in his study—THE SAVAGE GOD: A STUDY OF SUICIDE, by A. Alvarez; MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, which recounted Victor Frank’s survival in a concentration camp; and THE DENIAL OF DEATH by Ernest Becker. Whenever Dad was teaching his Dale Carnegie class, attending a meeting of the Lion’s Club, or traveling to New York on business, I parked myself on his red leather sofa in his book-lined study, usually with a box of Freihofer’s Chocolate Chip cookies and a tumbler of milk by my side, and read until my head ached.

So much misery for a fat, friendless teenager to gorge herself on. There was Sylvia Plath, survivor of multiple suicide attempts, and dead at 30 from the gas of an oven she’d turned on herself in a London flat in 1963. There were the Jews, gassed not by choice but by coercion, rounded up and stripped naked in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. The Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who had spent five years in four different labor camps, including Auchwitz, had lost his father, mother, brother, and wife in the Holocaust. Victor Frankl had stayed alive by summoning up the figure of his beloved wife, who had been shipped off to another camp, talking to her while fending off hunger, beatings and forced marches. Other survivors had recited poetry, scrawled drawings on bits of toilet paper, sung arias from operas they remembered. People, observed Frankl, could endure anything as long as they could still love, could stay connected to some person or idea greater than themselves. According to Ernest Becker, every human being needed a causa sui project (four years of Latin at Miss Hall’s School was finally proving useful) to help him forget that he was a “god who shits,” a great big pile of nothingness.

I didn’t have a clue what my own causa sui project was, but sometimes it seemed that Dad had one. Late at night, after coming home from his many meetings and long after my mother, sister and I had gone to bed, Dad would sit alone at the grand piano in the living room, playing Chopin. Dad was no Artur Rubinstein; he had taken up the piano as an adult, beginning around the same time I did, in the middle 1960s. (Years later, he would explain that his parents had not let him play as a child, insisting that the piano was for girls and forcing him to play the trumpet, which he gave up as soon as he was allowed to.) Dad and I had the same teacher, a woman named Betty Maby (this was her real name, which I accepted without irony as a child but which now seems darkly comic, if she were a character in a theatre of the absurd). Mrs. Maby had been a concert pianist in her youth, but was reduced in middle life to instructing children (still mostly girls, as my grandparents had observed a generation ago) in dumbed-down versions of Sheep May Safely Graze. (The first time I ever saw an antimacassar was in Mrs. Maby’s darkened living room in Lee, where freshly laundered squares of crocheted ivory and white lace stood guard over the backs and arms of sofas and armchairs.)

Dad was Betty Maby’s only adult student—he got to call her by her first name—and she was patient with him, his lack of rhythm and pitch, his middle-aged, arthritic fingers which were as clunky and intractable as corkscrews. But what he lacked in timing, tone and finger dexterity, he more than made up for in will. He even agreed to play in her spring and autumn student recitals in the antimacassar-ridden living room in Lee, performing at the end after all the children had finished, massacring simplified arrangements of Fur Elise and Air on a G String, despite the tranquillizers he took to still his shaking fingers. But no one but me, his daughter in a frilly dress shrinking into a sea of doilies in the back, seemed mortified by his performance. All the parents complimented him afterward over punch and cookies, confiding that they admired his courage.

When Dad played alone, with no one listening, he was at ease. There were two pieces by Chopin—the short Prelude in E Minor, which was fairly easy, and the Nocturne Opus 9 in E Flat Major which was more advanced--that he practiced over and over again, swaying on the piano bench as he leaned into and away from the keys, an expressiveness that Betty Maby, who insisted on an erect, still posture at all times, never permitted her younger charges. Dad rarely got through either piece without a mistake. The Nocturne, in particular, included several trills that were challenging for even the most experienced of players. But he played on, repeating the troublesome measures where he faltered, often waking me from the guest room above the back stairs where I had retreated to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. When the house would momentarily grow quiet, I would turn over groggily in my bed, relieved that he was calling it a night. But he had just stopped to turn on the metronome or crack his fingers back into shape. Within minutes, the mournful chords would roll out all over again.

Dad played the piano for forty years. He played long after I gave it up, through his separation and divorce, purchasing an upright Spinet when he moved into a two-bedroom bachelor’s cottage on Lake Onota. He continued to perform in Betty Maby’s student recitals in Lee, his longtime companion, Janet, and his elderly mother in the audience, though his mother confided to me, her granddaughter, that she really didn’t see why he kept at the darned thing, and why, for Pete’s sakes, couldn’t Betty get him to stop POUNDING on the keys. After his mother’s death in 1982, he purchased a second-hand Baldwin that had been used in summer concerts at Tanglewood and moved it into his mother’s living room, now his living room, in a sunny corner overlooking the back gardens. When Betty Maby retired and moved to Florida, Dad found a new teacher, who urged him to tackle more modern composers such as Scott Joplin and George Gershwin.

At Thanksgiving gatherings, which had become festive noisy affairs of a large blended family, Dad would preside over impromptu musicales, where the theme song from the Titanic, the Ashokan Farewell, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie’s would be picked out by various grandchildren and step-grandchildren. At the end of each performance, regardless of whether it was heartbreakingly beautiful or simply heartbreaking, Dad would clap and shout, “Encore! Encore!” When the other performers begged him to take his place at the piano bench, he obliged with a halting but lively rendition of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer.

Dad moved his piano to the two-bedroom condo he shares with Janet on the grounds of their assisted living facility in Maine, but he rarely plays much anymore. Instead, he reads The New York Times, walks on the beach, watches television, and does crossword puzzles. Last winter he broke his hip while walking on the ice, and while he has made a remarkable recovery, he has become more cautious, less driven by the need to fill every moment with purposeful activity, more content to sit of a warm afternoon on his terrace and nap.

He’s ninety. He’s entitled to sleep in the sun. But I would give anything to hear him play that Chopin Nocturne again.