The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  Like many childless people, Helle found children mildly intimidating; for this reason it didn’t immediately occur to her that the twins, truculent Flo in particular, might be waiting for her to take control of the situation. Nor was it as if she hadn’t already decided what it was that she wanted, only that, because she was dealing with children, she wasn’t sure how to get it. “Girls,” she eventually said, “I’m embarrassed to have to admit that I need your help.” A rapid exchange of bright, flickering glances, during which Helle looked longingly toward the far end of the trailer and the dark, windowless corner where she’d noticed a small maple bed, invitingly made up with clean white sheets and a thick pile of blankets under a red-and-white patchwork quilt. It was late, Helle continued, and a long way back to town. Would the twins mind very much if she were to spend the night? Needless to say she didn’t confess that her more comprehensive plan included moving out of the Blackburns’ house and into their trailer. Back and forth the glances flew—finches in apple trees, thrushes in bedstraw. “All right,” Flo said at last. She was the one who spoke, although as usual there was no way of knowing which twin, if any, had influenced the decision.

  Outside it was snowing again, the wind was blowing, and the moon had disappeared. Lying on his stomach in front of the television, William was watching Boris Karloff in The Mummy, even though it was long past his bedtime. Go back, he told the mummy, go back, because he knew that if it didn’t, people would take off the wrappings and nothing would be left of it but dust. In the kitchen, Maren was staring at the telephone, trying to decide if she should use it. A raccoon came out of the weeds at the turn onto the Branch Road, its eyes like two pricks in the dark, making Sam slam on his brakes. “Damn you,” he said, and he meant Helle. He couldn’t see the spikehorn walking through the meadow, nibbling at frozen clover; he couldn’t see it because the lights were on in my house and Sam was thinking about me. In the top bunk Ruby was wondering whether things were going to be different now; in the bottom bunk Flo was dreaming about a new pet, a tiny black kitten that she was coaxing to drink milk out of a sky-blue saucer.

  V

  BECAUSE, of course, anything can happen in a dream. A fierce old woman can be turned into a soft and trusting creature; she can be made to act in ways which betray her true nature. In a dream the dead can come back to life, and make you do things you’d never have done when they were still alive. They can make you let them touch you, make you open your body to them. They can make you doubt your own true nature, leave you lying there on your bed sick with spent desire for something you never thought you wanted in the first place. How many times did Helle show up in my dreams, her skin like a sheet of water, thin and clear, an insufficient disguise for the glassy stalk of her will? Watery hands, watery mouth, turning suddenly, unexpectedly, to soft, pliant flesh. I could never resist her, whereas when I dreamed about Sam there was always an impediment to passion, a missing body part, an entire body disintegrating into vapor, thin air. Helle, I’m sure, would have seen this as yet another piece of proof that there was nothing substantial about sex, that it was yet another of the waking dreams we are afflicted with, and given its foundation in the physical world, a particularly insidious one. “There is no greed,” she told me, “worse than the body’s.” The body, so greedy for transport, simultaneously longed to remain intact, a greedy bag of skin, forever and ever. Music, Helle said, alone of all the arts, could not only replicate but also remedy this condition. This was due to the fact that music—unlike a book, a painting, or a piece of sculpture (which she called “puppet droppings”)—didn’t exist as matter, nor did it require the presence of a material body to register its existence.

  As for the obvious objections to this scheme—the role played by the ears, for instance, or by the musicians and their instruments, not to mention the overwhelming materiality of an opera house, its sets, costumes, and lights—wasn’t that, when you got right down to it, exactly Helle’s point? Body and spirit, she said. Naturally the senses played a part. They were like doorways to the mind, to its boglike furrows and folds, grayish, unfurnished. So you might provide the onstage image of a single ghostly jib sail, the moon’s light filtered through it. Three singers. The doors open and there is the stage, magically reduced in size, magically lodged in the boglike landscape of your mind. Stuck, really. It isn’t until the music begins that you recognize the existence of another doorway; it’s the music which calls that doorway into being, the music which enters through it, the music which suggests a way out. Unlike sex, Helle said.

  Thus I came to understand the guiding principle behind The Harrowing of Lahloo, its musical structure all entrances and exits, just like Helle’s face when she would talk about her struggles composing it, the face of a younger woman, as seductive and baffling as the three strange riddles of its opening trio: difficult and complex, “the fragmented voice of a dying civilization,” to quote Peter Sellars. I admit that the first time I listened to that trio my own response was anything but universal, infused instead with a sense that the message it conveyed might prove crucial to my own future happiness, if only I were able to understand it. A veiled message, a veiled set; masts and sails, flickering moonlight: the vertical masts of Lahloo’s unearthly triads appear and disappear within Harry Tuck’s saillike sweeps of melody, within the flickering moonlight of Rattail’s patter. Three voices, three riddles: What cuts but draws no blood? What has no hair but tickles going through the hole? What rooted first in earth and then in water?

  It took me a while, but eventually it dawned on me that in each case the answer to the character’s riddle was his or her own name, and that the reason why I’d taken so long was because the music itself defied the possibility of simple resolution. “A newborn babe,” Harry Tuck suggests, in response to Rattail’s query; “The soul of man,” to Lahloo’s. An unadorned tune in C minor—forthright enough, and yet when phrases of it intersect with Lahloo’s D-minor triads, a disturbing dissonance is created, a subtle indictment of Harry Tuck’s romanticism. What has no hair but tickles going through the hole? The tail of a rat, I thought: Rattail. Besides, hadn’t Helle told me never to trust a tenor? I seem to remember the snow-covered sidewalk in front of the Blackburns’ house, the wrenched and wavering sound of Sam’s voice as he sang to himself while shoveling a path. “Duke Duke Duke”—scrape scrape scrape—“Nothing can stop me now….” The shovel tearing ragged chinks in the sun-bright wall of snow, his pinkish face, his nose coated with a white paste to prevent burning—he was doing a lousy job. Dancer had been a tenor, Helle said; likewise the famous Antonio Giuglini, whose hobbies included flying kites and making fireworks and who died, mad, at the age of thirty-eight. If you were going to throw in your lot with a man, better to choose a baritone or a bass. At least with a bass you knew what you were getting yourself in for. Who ever said sex was mysterious? Those tenors! So melodramatic, so sentimental! Unlike Buggy Moore, for instance, whose attitude toward life, like Rattail’s, was uniformly salacious, anecdotal, phallic. “I knew a man who loved a dame,” Rattail sings, “a darling in a flowered gown. Each time he put it in she came; she got so wet he thought he’d drown.”

  But why bother choosing between the lesser of two evils, when there was a third, more fitting choice open to you? Why devote even a minute of your precious life to a man whose skin was the only sensitive thing about him? Look at him! That hat! Those mittens! Helle liked to do this, during the month or so immediately following her move to the trailer, to plan our walks so that they included a brief detour down Quarry Road. It was as if she wanted to remind both of us of what she’d left behind, an impulse echoed in her sudden need to re-examine that earlier period in her life when she’d likewise “snipped the thread.” Lahloo, she told me, Lahloo was the key. All I had to do was concentrate on Lahloo’s response to the riddles—“The spirit’s egress, the flying fish, the worm in the flesh”—and, at the same time, listen to the way the triads were beginning a gradual shift from minor to major, culminating at last
in the C-major triad. Arpeggiated, repeated twice, the first time ending on middle C, the second time an octave higher, eerily triumphant: “A drowning man.” Do, mi, so, do. Could I hear it? The music coming to rest in that simplest and most familiar of chords? And didn’t I want to extract from it the promise of a warm parlor, the smell of bread baking in a nearby oven? Didn’t I want to imagine myself sitting in the Blackburns’ parlor, Sam watching me as I knitted him yet one more ridiculous hat? Oh, there would be no stopping me, once I got started! The embrace of a loving husband, the comfort of the nuptial chamber, the expected intimacies, the lie of Home—wasn’t that, after all, what the music tricked me into believing I wanted?

  Although unless you hadn’t escaped from home at least once, Helle explained, the ironic message of the C-major triad would possibly leave you cold. That was why she’d decided to elaborate on the lie, to position Skyboots, the ship’s mascot, high in the sails, where he can give eloquent and invisible voice to it. Because he remains invisible throughout the course of the opera, Helle compensated him with some of her sweetest music; his first aria in particular—“Dancing Sister”—became extremely popular in the spring of 1925, following the Royal Danish Opera company’s first production of Lahloo. In those days you could walk down almost any street in Copenhagen and expect to hear that sweetly artless melody coming through an open window: a woman humming it as she watered her Holland bulbs, a chef whistling it as he sprinkled chopped dill across a slice of salt-cured salmon. More recently Paul Simon revived “Dancing Sister,” turning it into a tango—you can imagine the twins’ surprise when I told them it was Helle’s song. As she originally conceived it, it was supposed to be sung a cappella by a young boy whose voice hadn’t yet changed: after the opening trio’s complicated layering, “Dancing Sister” was calculated to drop like a silver coin into the porcelain cup of your ear. The boy confuses the skysail with his sister’s white dress, billowing outward as she dances to a music box in her bedroom; he confuses the Pleiades with the string of pearls around her neck. And then the string breaks, the pearls fall, becoming the Ladrone Islands—home of pirates—their volcanic peaks shining up ahead in the moonlight. “Dancing sister, I’m your consort, you’re my compass, I’m your star,” the boy sings. “Touch your face and I’m there with you, wind and water from afar. Little sister, dance forever, dance me through the China Seas; the pirate’s knife tucked in your sash for you to do with as you please. Dance forever, you’re the treasure, you’re the one who went away, golden rings are on your fingers, I’m the one who chose to stay.”

  SPRING ARRIVED—Helle’s second spring in Copenhagen—and with it a persistent light rain, day after day. The gutters filled with rivers of gray water on which she could see floating the boat-shaped leaves of the lindens; the King’s Guards shivered as they stood in their tall bearskin hats, pegging down all four corners of the Amalienborg Plaza, pretending not to notice when Helle came to a sudden halt by the central statue of a dead king on his horse, her face rigid with purpose, making a wish. The guards pretended not to notice, as if their scrutiny might make the wish turn sour. Unlike me, Francie Thorn, whose curse it is to notice everything—the rain running down Helle’s cheeks, the glistening drops of rain beading in her eyelashes, the way she cheated, plucking the eyelash out instead of letting it fall naturally, wiping it off on her coat sleeve because it was too wet to blow away. A little shiver, a little sigh. You can do that, I know—you can pay too much attention to what’s going on inside another person. And while you’re thus engaged, a magpie can come and steal the watch from your pocket. The world might end; a magpie can sneak up and steal your darling’s heart.

  As for the exact nature of that wish, who knows? Certainly the libretto to Lahloo contains its share of sexual innuendo (the opening trio’s riddles, for instance), so that if you wanted to, you could see the entire opera as the workings of a suppressed libido. Helle, of course, would scoff at such a suggestion. Blackmail from the Vienna Woods, she’d call it. Hadn’t she told me that during her four years at the conservatory she resisted whatever sexual longings she might have felt, that she’d kept to herself and so developed a reputation for arrogance? For the most part, she said, the other students left her to her own devices, although after word of her nocturnal habits got out she would sometimes hear scuffling sounds in the hallway; once, when she’d been banging very hard on the piano, a note came sliding through the crack at the bottom of the door. “Not Plutus but Apollo rules Parnassus,” it read, a quotation from Fux.

  Still, as I am well aware, no matter how hard you try to remain isolated, autonomous behavior exerts an attraction of its own. As it turned out, there were two young women in the school who desired Henning’s attentions. One was a large, alarming cellist from a Norwegian town above the Arctic Circle; the second, with whom Helle eventually formed a guarded friendship, was a brash and cheerful girl from Aalborg, Linka Grubbe, whose singing voice and sweet tooth reminded her of Inger, although the resemblance ended there. Linka was another of Bingger’s pets, a fact she traded on shamelessly. Success at the conservatory, she said, might be assured in one of two ways. Either you were, as Helle was, a genuine musician, or you figured out how to act like one. Linka ended up on the stage, singing roles in light opera, a profession to which her voice and temperament were perfectly suited. Once she was even miscast as Nightingale in her hometown’s production of Fuglespil; I know this because the clipping she sent Helle from the Aalborg paper eventually made its way into the quilted glove box. “Hvad for noget?!”— “What on earth?!”—Linka had written in the margin, with an arrow pointing at a photograph showing her now elderly body perched in a large tree, her formerly brash mouth wide open, wheezing out the subtle aria with which Act Two begins.

  Despite Helle’s claim that her childish crush on Inger ended the minute she boarded the Copenhagen train, it seems clear that it hadn’t, and that the afternoons she spent in La Glace, watching Linka devour pastries, could be explained only by her resemblance to Inger. Certainly Helle wasn’t interested in the gossip Linka dispensed so freely, leaning across a delicate, white-clothed table. Who cared that Hr. Ørsted (woodwinds) had been fired because he’d gotten a third-year clarinet student pregnant? Or that the old woman who mopped the floors had once been accounted a great beauty, and was Niels Gade’s lover? Linka would hide her large feet in their worn-out shoes under the table, smooth her unruly, thick hair, and then gracefully lift the chocolate pot to pour. That man sitting across the room, eating a slice of sportskage (macaroons, profiteroles, crumbled nougat, whipped cream), might be the owner of a shipbuilding company, or prominent in the Bourse; he might even be a member of the royal family. For Linka was hoping to trap a rich husband—a fact which she confided tenderly, so as not to hurt Henning’s feelings. Whereas Helle confided nothing. “But even Mozart had a mother and father,” Linka said once, exasperated.

  No, it seems clear to me that Helle continued to moon after Inger. This would explain the ferocity with which I imagine her whacking her boot heel against the window frame in her practice room, eventually managing to jar it loose. Hadn’t she just received Inger’s letter informing her of an anticipated trip to the city, asking her if she’d help choose a trousseau? “I have decided to marry Hans Fog,” Inger wrote. In the country, when it rains, the air fills with smells of vegetation and dirt. In the city, even one as dedicated to cleanliness as Copenhagen, what you smell is prodigal and human—coal fumes, soggy paper, drenched pavement, blood and fat from the butcher shops on the far side of town, hothouse flowers and carnal sweat, bilge and tar. Rain was pattering on the windowsill, making a small damp spot on the floor. The rat had vanished into his hole, either to sleep or to eat; maybe he had a family in there, she thought, a wife, little rats.

  Helle stuck her head out the window and let the rain wash her face. What was Inger doing now? The Nissens all went to bed early, so Inger was probably sound asleep in the large bed she shared with her sisters, their soft arms and legs bra
iding together under a light-blue quilt filled with duck feathers. Everything at the Nissens’ farm was well padded. The one time, years earlier, that Helle had been invited to spend the night, the sisters had complained about her skinniness and the unpleasant sharpness of her knees and elbows. “Helle sleeps by herself,” Inger had told them, but they hadn’t believed it. If she were to lean far enough out the window, Helle wondered, could she see the Nissens’ chimney rising up on the other side of Mogens Stream? Of course if you looked back you turned into salt; you sent the person you loved best straight to hell. In certain circumstances this could be yourself. “I’m your consort,” Helle sang. “You’re my compass.” The aria, which she had recently completed, pleased her. In the building across the way she could see into a lit room where a bald man sat in an armchair reading a book. What was so bad about sleeping alone? At least she would never have to share her bed with Hans Fog, who no doubt ground his teeth and slept with his eyelids half-open.