Dissonance (3 page)

‘What are these?' Madge asked.

‘They seem to be Jo's.'

Madge lifted the lid and took out one of the letters. There was no name or address on the envelope, just the initials, JH. She opened the letter and read a few lines.

‘They are his?' Mrs Collins smiled.

‘Yes,' Madge replied, folding and replacing the letter, realising the old cow knew very well what they were.

‘They were hidden in the wall, behind a tile,' the shopkeeper explained.

‘Can you add those things to my account?' Madge asked.

‘Of course.'

‘Erwin, the basket, please … thank you, Mrs Collins.'

As they drove home, Madge's hands shook on the wheel. She ran a stop sign on Jollytown Road and almost lost control on gravel on the hill above their house.

‘What are they?' Erwin asked.

‘Business letters.'

‘What sort?'

She glared at him. ‘Does it matter?'

Erwin leaned forward to pick a letter out of the box at his mother's feet.

‘No,' she screamed. ‘What did I just say?'

He sat back.

‘Do I say things for the sake of it?'

‘No,' he whispered.

Whoever the letter writer was, her drawings (surrounded by French phrases, snatches of Donne and lipstick) were highly refined. And what's more, she'd studied Jo's body in some detail. The lines of pencil-thin charcoal were like preparatory sketches for a painting – Jo's stomach hanging in a fold, covering his pubic hair and threatening to obscure his knob-cock. Then there were his freckled breasts, threatening milk in a paddock of hair that had repulsed her on their wedding night.

So, she was right to have done what she did. Grace was right, she was right. Her only regret was having cared for him when he was sick – for having washed his sheets, two or three times a day, for reading to him for hours on end, for going to town to fetch his papers and tobacco, for allowing Erwin to play hours of sentimental music to soothe him when he should've been playing technical studies; for marrying him in the first place (although millions made that mistake); for agreeing to the Compromise; for showing respect to a disrespectful man, love to a loveless man, compassion to a manipulator.

Erwin, sitting silently in the cabin, staring up into a cloud-washed sky, wondered what was in the letters – what his father had said, and to whom. He longed to hear the voices his mother censored. He could hear Jo's voice, explaining. ‘Listen, old man, do you ever wonder why she doesn't let me in the house?'

‘She says you're a bad influence.'

‘Ha. There are two sides to every coin, son.'

Erwin could remember a day when Madge was outside hanging clothes on the line, when he heard his father calling for him from his sick bed. ‘Shot-a-tee … come talk to your dad.'

Thinking, I can't go in.

‘Shot-a-tee …'

Edging towards the door.

‘Come on, son, you won't have much longer.'

Turning, running out to the shed, curling up on his dad's old camp bed.

Madge pulled up in the drive. She tugged on the handbrake, turned to her son and said, ‘I saved you from him, Erwin.'

‘Who?'

She didn't reply.

‘From Dad?'

‘Promise me you love me?'

‘I don't need to say it all the time.'

‘Say it.'

‘I love you, Mum.'

She picked up the box of letters. ‘You'll thank me one day.'

‘For what?'

She frowned. ‘And you won't have to ask.' She opened her door and climbed out of the truck. As she started walking across the yard towards the incinerator she said, ‘The basket, Erwin.'

Erwin took the basket and went into their unlocked house, leaving the food on the kitchen table. The he returned to the piano. Without stretching his fingers, or warming up, he started playing the first piece from Bach's
Well Tempered Clavier
from memory.

You'll thank me, Madge thought, as she heard the music across the paddock, as she emptied the box full of letters into the incinerator, as she took a match from the damp box that had been left on the ground.

I saved you from him
 … Erwin guessed she was probably right. The apple never fell far from the tree.

‘Damn it,' Madge growled, as she tried to strike a wet match. ‘Damn you, Johann Hergert.'

As she forced his sheets into the wash basin, and realised she had shit half way up her arm.

Chapter Two

Father O'Gorman's music class was small, eaten away by colds, gastro and the Linke brothers moving to Melbourne. Seven students sat in the first two rows, adjusting ties, yawning, watching a distant tractor as it slowly bogged itself. Erwin was at the front, eyeing off Father O'Gorman with suspicion. It wasn't that he was Catholic, or even religious. It wasn't that he was unpleasant or a bad teacher. There was no single reason that made Erwin uneasy. Maybe it was because he was a pretender, sucking up to dim-witted girls, explaining how he'd once met Ravel, how he'd played for the King and cooked toast with the Pope, how he'd given up his parish to teach (although there was more to it than that – why did he still wear his robes, and why did they still have to call him Father?). Maybe it was because, as a piano teacher, Erwin had outgrown him years before. Maybe it was because he could see through him – his fat, clumsy fingers stumbling through the simplest runs, his primitive sense of rhythm, his inability to handle counterpoint. Perhaps it was because of all the things Madge had said about him. ‘Erwin, it's time we found someone else for you.'

Father O'Gorman stood in front of his class holding a record between the tips of his fingers. ‘And next is Sigmund Romberg,' he began. ‘Who's heard of him?'

Erwin put up his hand.

‘Erwin?'

‘He composes operettas.'

‘Which are?'

‘Vaudeville. Romantic songs, silly storylines.'

Second rate, he wanted to say.

‘No, not at all,' O'Gorman replied. ‘Listen and see if you change your mind.'

The old priest carefully placed the record on the rubber playing-surface of a near-new gramophone. ‘Now, did anyone see the film
The Night Is Young
?'

Silence. Seven blank faces with mouths hanging open.

‘Your parents might have. This song's called
When I Grow Too Old To Dream
.'

The needle dropped onto the record and Father O'Gorman sat down, closing his eyes and smiling as the violins played the melody, eventually fading as a deep, swooning voice began. Erwin looked at the girl beside him and grinned. He pretended to sing a few words and she bit her lip to avoid laughing.

‘Now, listen to the curve of the melody,' O'Gorman said, conducting, still with his eyes closed. ‘Listen how it starts low here and climbs … climbs … there, that's a jump of a tenth.'

Erwin started conducting and the girl looked away, burying her head in her hands.

‘When I grow too old to dream,' Father O'Gorman sang, off-key, his voice warbling with a melodrama that almost turned Erwin's stomach.

Yes, this was the O'Gorman he knew. The O'Gorman who'd first taught him at the age of eight or nine, when Madge realised her son had outgrown her musically. The O'Gorman of shaking hand and muffed scales, of over-pedalling and violent attack, of missing accidentals and abbreviated chords. The man who claimed to be the best piano teacher in the Valley, who gave after-school piano lessons to kids and parents who didn't know any better.

Although Madge did, taking Erwin to town one Sunday to hear other boys, younger than her son, playing much harder pieces, playing with better phrasing, better technique, more spirit, more fire. On the way home she said to him, ‘That's enough of the Catholic priest.' The very next day she contacted the conservatorium and asked about single studies. In the weeks leading up to Erwin's audition she pushed him harder and harder, and when he was accepted she shouted him a meal of fried fish.

The priest sat and listened to the hiss after the music was gone. ‘Well?' he asked, without opening his eyes.

‘It's terrible,' Erwin whispered.

Father O'Gorman looked at him. ‘To a young man.'

‘To anyone. It just takes the best of lieder and ruins it. The melody's predictable, there's nothing unexpected or chromatic, it's all part of the chord … and there are only three of those.'

‘Some of the best music is simple.'

‘And some of the worst. The words are meaningless; they're not sad or … anything, just, embarrassing. What do they mean? “When I grow too old to dream.” Don't you dream more when you're old?'

The priest smiled. ‘I can hear your mother talking.'

‘No, it's me. And the accompaniment is childish … clunk, clunk. Every chord is major, no ninths or elevenths.'

O'Gorman thought he knew better. He stood up and started walking up and down the aisle between the desks. Yes, it was Madge's voice all right, ringing him up at all hours of the night, asking why Erwin had been given an Irving Berlin song for homework.

‘Songs are part of a pianist's job too, Mrs Hergert,' he'd replied.

‘Not these sort of songs. Schubert, Mahler, Brahms. But Irving Berlin, there's nothing to be gained from that.'

‘Mrs Hergert, it's all important.'

‘It's not.'

‘Well, if you don't like my approach …'

‘Yes?'

O'Gorman stood at the back of the room with his hands behind his back. ‘Music is evolutionary,' he said. ‘It borrows, and changes, and grows. Operetta is a synthesis. It contains everything from Mozart to minstrel music. I believe it will be
the
musical art form of the twentieth century.'

‘Nonsense,' Erwin whispered. ‘It's a stew. It's the best bits of worn-out music. It's a fad, for people who live in the past, who have no vision.'

O'Gorman approached him. ‘That's all music's ever been.'

Erwin turned to look at him. ‘What about Stravinsky?'

‘Talk about fads.'

‘This, this is laziness. What about jazz? Duke Ellington? Have
you
heard his
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
?' He looked around. ‘Has anyone?'

Silence, and then the sound of a floor-buffer starting up downstairs and someone laughing across the hall in Home Economics.

O'Gorman smiled. ‘You are your mother's son.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

‘There's no need to be rude.'

Erwin took a deep breath and looked ahead. ‘I'm sorry, Father.' He looked at him. ‘It is, Father, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

Five years of wasted Thursday afternoons, Erwin thought. And to think, I once believed he was the greatest musician ever.

Long, hot afternoons playing music that he'd mastered years before, as the priest cut his toenails or watered his ferns; as he opened the score of
The Pirates of Penzance
and accompanied himself as the Major-General; as he listened to the races and marked the results in his
Best Bets
.

When Madge wrote to him telling him she'd found another teacher, he said, ‘I see a great future for Erwin.'

And she thought, Yes, if you haven't ruined him with Irving Berlin.

The bell rang and they were dismissed. ‘Except for you, Erwin, can you stay behind?'

The usual lecture: I gave up a lot to teach at Nuriootpa – six years at seminary, a congregation who were like family. ‘And after all I've done for you, you speak to me like that.'

‘Like what?'

‘Disrespectfully.'

‘No, it was a discussion.'

‘This is a school.'

‘But operetta?'

O'Gorman shook his head. ‘Your mother had a choice. There were other piano teachers around.'

‘Dearer.'

‘Better?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

Erwin walked down an almost deserted hallway. He stopped at his locker to change books and admire a sketch he'd made and stuck on the inside of his locker door: the Hindu god Vishnu watching Krishna reading from the
Bhagavad-Gita
. Madge would only let him read the best books – the Bible, the Koran and a treatise on the Four Noble Truths. ‘Fantasy,' she explained, ‘but the seeds of truth, nonetheless.'

Then there was Marx, and Darwin, read aloud beside the fire at night. Dickens was dismissed as too contrived and D.H. Lawrence was tasted, but rejected. There was nothing Australian except for a slim volume of Gordon's miscellaneous poems. In the end, Erwin's favourites were Freeman's
History of the Norman Conquests
and almost anything by Hans Christian Andersen.

Erwin passed an administration area that smelt of laurel sulphate and cut irises and there, outside the Deputy's office, was the wooden chair with its broken leg that he'd sat on on his first day at his new school. He remembered waiting for what seemed like hours, feeling nervous, alone and forgotten as the tall, sideburned Year 12s walked past and grinned at him (or was it his long shorts?). He'd come from St John's Lutheran, a small, community school hidden behind Langmeil church. It had a low, stone fence topped with a lattice of crosses and classrooms filled with portraits of Luther at various ages.

It had all been part of the Compromise. Jo had insisted on a Lutheran education. He could handle the shed, the whip and even murky water from the barrel, but he wouldn't have everyone in the valley knowing
his
kid went to a state school – a godless school, a school with terrazzo hallways and dead aspidistras in copper pots, unwashed windows and posters of Mae West in the staff room. He wouldn't have every­one asking why, and urging him to do something about it.

Madge put up with it for years. Jo drove him to school every morning and a neighbour brought him home in the early evening. She put up with the masses and the religious education classes, the colour-in saints, the sacraments and confirmation; she kept her mouth closed on presentation nights when the principal droned on about Jesus-this and Jesus-that and atheists being cast into Hell, and she even gave to the Lutheran charities that sent their propaganda home through her son's reading-folder.

But then, one parent–teacher evening, one of Erwin's teachers asked, ‘And how's Erwin's brother getting along?'

‘His brother?'

‘Yes, I see Mr Hergert pick him up some afternoons. Declan, isn't it?'

Madge rushed home and stormed out to the shed. ‘Declan,' she said, without a word of explanation.

Jo shrugged. ‘So, you knew?'

‘How dare you embarrass me. Why's he at the same school?'

‘There's not that many around.'

‘And where does the mother live?'

Jo stretched out on his camp-bed and opened up a magazine. He adjusted the wick on his kerosene lamp and replied, ‘What's it matter?'

Madge just stared at him. ‘I'm pulling Erwin out of that school.'

Jo sat up. ‘No you're not.'

‘Just watch.'

He stood up. ‘Are you threatening me?'

‘I don't need your money. If you want, I'll go back to my parents' farm.'

‘You knew.'

‘The same school? Why couldn't you bring your own son home? How much time do you spend with these … people?'

Jo paused. ‘You won't go,' he whispered.

She folded her arms. ‘I could make it hard for you, Jo.'

Stand-off. ‘I'm pulling him out of that school,' she repeated.

This time he didn't argue. He turned away from her and flicked through the magazine without reading a word. He weighed up his options, and kept quiet.

Madge didn't waste any time. She kept Erwin home the next day, and the next. She wrote a letter of withdrawal and hand-delivered it to St John's. If one teacher had noticed then others would too, and soon the secretaries, lab assistants and parents would all know. Maybe they already did. Maybe they were the ones who gathered in groups, smiling at her as she walked past, but never opening their circle for her to stop and chat – as they whispered about the bastard son and the slut mother and how Madge had brought it all on herself. Of course, none of them knew about her son, or his gift for music. Again, the second-rate trying to bring them down with gossip and a god that had turned their brains to syrup, with a lack of intellect and imagination – too much sunshine and too many honey cakes.

She home-schooled him for months – every day, an hour of English, an hour of Maths and five hours of piano. But eventually there was a knock on the door and a man in a suit telling her that school attendance was compulsory.

‘Why?' she asked. ‘So they can teach him to be ordinary?'

‘Or I can issue a summons. You decide.'

That's how he'd ended up on the broken chair, waiting, while his mother talked to the deputy principal and asked him what they were going to do to develop her son's talents.

‘The same we do for everyone, Mrs Hergert.'

‘Of course … And, there's no, religion?'

Erwin walked out the front door of his school and a light mist of rain fell across his face. He squinted and, off towards Penrice Road, saw his mother waiting in her truck. She sounded the horn a few times and waved, motioning for him to hurry up. He jogged across the front lawn, under the near-leafless oak trees and jumped a low wire fence.

‘Mummy's here,' a boy called, a farmer's son waiting for a lift, a heavy-set child with a single eyebrow and a shirt three sizes too small. The boy looked at his younger brother and he looked up at Madge. ‘Hello, Mrs Erwin,' he called.

Madge wound down the window. ‘Pardon?'

‘My uncle had a truck like that,' the older boy said, as Erwin climbed up the four steps to the cabin.

‘You two behave,' she said.

There was no reply.

‘How was it?' she asked, as they set off.

Erwin adjusted a seatbelt that had come loose from its mounting. ‘We had O'Gorman and he played Sigmund Romberg.'

Madge threw her head back as she changed gears. ‘How surprising! Did you practise at lunchtime?'

‘Just a fugue …' He turned to her. ‘One I wrote.'

She kept her eyes on the road. ‘A fugue?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is it any good?'