Chapter 9

Emmy twirled her hair around her finger but otherwise did and said nothing as Hance drove back to the college. The look on her face as she stood at the music stand in the center of the room could have been that of the Madonna suckling the infant Christ in a Reni painting—flushed, contented, intent on the pleasure of her duty as the Ultimate Mother. Hance perceived none of the embarrassment that had scourged her audition or last week’s lesson. She still sounded like a remnant of Mary Guaire, but she was at peace, either resigned to her lack of talent or accustomed to it the way a needy person grows accustomed to the horrid quality of the clothes she can afford to wear.

Hance would not intimidate her, as he had done the week before. He listened, he coached her, and he listened some more as she failed to do as instructed. Unlike Emmy, he was not at peace with what she heard or perhaps thought of herself.  He could not reconcile why a student who said she liked to sing would refuse to learn how. She convinced him of his inability to form her into an artist yet defied him to form her. He glimpsed himself as a charred tree––upright but carbonized, never to thrive in the sun or burst forth blossoms in the spring. He wanted to seize her and glut himself with the substance that welled from deep within her, engorging her breasts and belly, waiting to be tapped.

Emmy scratched through the pages of her songbook. “What you’re playing? I don’t see that written here? Is that some kind of interlude? Is there another verse after it?”

He had gone from the accompaniment to Che farò senza Euridice into the melancholy air from the Dance of the Blessed Spirits, both from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. A silly aberration.  Now Emmy would have to suspect something odd about him. He devised an explanation. “The two sections sound alike. It was easy to go from one to the other. The classic accompanist’s mistake. Excuse me.”

“How did you do it?”

How did he do what?

“Get that tone. It reminded me of a sunny day in winter. Bright but frigid. It made me think the only way Orfeo could face life without Euridice was to no longer care about everyone and everything that ever mattered to him. They all meant nothing to him. His own life meant nothing to him. It gave me the shivers.”

Really? Try this.

He leaned into the keyboard, producing a tone that he knew would move her as if she had accepted a man into her and held him there, absorbing what he spilled with the serenity of parched earth in a soft rain. He held the final notes until the sound weakened and was heard no more.

“Did the composer want the music to sound like that?”

He looked up. Emmy was hugging herself­––chilled, not impassioned. Hadn’t she felt what he projected? He heard himself say, “There aren’t any directions in the score,” with no trace of the confusion and disappointment that scraped his confidence.

“So if you were conducting that opera, you would want that part to leave your audience feeling cold and heartless?”

Heartless as if they were gutted by events too terrible to bear, or heartless as implied by the words cynical, jaded and uncaring?

He leafed through the book for Heidenröslein, The Hedge Rose, an innocuous little Schubert song. “I’m not conducting that opera, Emmy, but I do know I’m not sure what I would do at that point.”

“Sorry, I just … wondered.”

Ignoring the semblance of contrition, Hance continued the lesson, and she continued to sing and not follow his suggestions. He stopped trying to teach her and let her sing as she would, hoping none of his peers noted his apparent inability to correct her unique deviation from accepted performance standards. At the end of the lesson, he assigned her some easy songs from the Elizabethan period and said he would see her the following week at her regular lesson time. He wondered if she could tell how much it hurt him to be polite to her. She left, crushing the paper on which he had written her assignment.

Like concrete slopped into an architectural hole, Emmy’s rebellion hardened into a mass that formed the foundation of all Hance thought for the rest of the day. Through all the classes, through all the lessons, through all the rehearsals, he didn’t know which rattled him more, her arrogance or his willingness to believe she could make him doubt his talent. The letters after his name and his position at the college confirmed his worth. He didn’t need the students’ approval; they needed his. If Emmy persisted in taunting him, he would indulge in the power of his position and give her a failing grade if she didn’t improve by the end of the semester. If she failed other classes, she would be compelled to leave the college, but if her grade point average was good enough for her to survive the semester. he could always refuse to take her as a student next semester. Either way, he wouldn’t have to deal with her any more.

He was in his office marking papers when she appeared at the door, which he always kept open. It was after dark. She must have been on her way to class after dinner, for she balanced a small cupcake on the palm of her hand.

“I forgot to say thank you for driving me back here and giving me that lesson. You didn’t have to.”

The way the words rushed out of her and the speed with which she plopped the cupcake on his desk inferred she would escape the building awash in tears. But all she did was step back, her cheeks a bright, frost-nip pink.

Hance eyed the gooey gift. The tilt and clumpy frosting suggested it had originated in somebody’s kitchen, not a commercial bakery. “Did you bake this?”

“The nuns did,” she whispered.

He listened, willing himself not to bother with the suspicions and rationalizations that suddenly destroy whatever ill we think of someone and make us doubt ourselves as much as we had doubted that person.

“I know I messed up my lesson,” Emmy was saying, bending low over the desk so he could hear her. “I was thinking of something. Something I really need to talk about with somebody.”

So the lost lamb needs a Father Confessor. Lay professors could always brush off a student with personal troubles by advising psychological counseling. For Hance, listening to woes came with the collar and vestments. He had no choice. “What’s the matter?”

“Promise you won’t think I’m silly?”

“Yes, of course.”

It had to be awful. She looked over her shoulder, as if signaling for Hance to suggest closing the door. Afraid she would say something for a confessor’s ears only, he pushed back his chair and would have closed the door himself when she said, “Those children in the woods behind Father Dario’s church … I want to teach them.”

Was that all?

He wasn’t surprised. The girl was an education major. “That’s an excellent idea. I suppose they could use a tutor.”

“I mean … I want to start a school for them. Could you help me?”