The Pox Party Read online

  I did not complain of my treatment; indeed, complaint may often make intolerable some circumstances which otherwise were swallowed, digested, and let pass. On some heads, this demotion from scholar to servant simplified my lot, for as I passed from childhood to youth, it would have been increasing awkward for me to act as a lordling in that house, merely reading and playing the violin while the others toiled around me; luxury would have pained me. I now saw their stares when I was favored, due to my experimental status; and so it was preferable to work alongside them; after a time, my lessons with Mr. Sharpe seeming to all — myself included — not so much like a privilege as a more peculiar and arcane chore, as we viewed the grooming of the silkworms or the supper of the asp.

  It was curious to aid in my small ways with the preparation of the meal, turning the spit or shaving the sweet-potatoes, and then to run and dress for dining, when my presence was required at table; to sit amidst the chatter of those who never saw the yams skinned or the luncheon-fowl with its head on; Bono over my shoulder silently serving me morsels I had just cut into a bucket an hour before.

  There were other lessons taught me by Bono, too.

  He taught me where he hid when he did not wish to serve; most effective being the cellar, where, did Mr. Sharpe send a boy after him, he could claim he was inspecting the vintages or rearranging tubers; or, in times of greater need, the kitchen of Mr. Gitney’s nephew, some two streets away, where Bono’s mother labored as a servant in the kitchen.

  Once, when concocting a varnish with Mr. Gitney, Mr. Sharpe chanced to spill some of their new mixture on his cravat, which left a yellow stain. He entrusted it to the laundry-maid, who, being unable to remove the mark, entrusted it to Bono.

  “This, Prince O.,” said Bono, with some appreciation, “is a tearing fine cravat.” He held it before his throat, wrapped once around his hand. “It makes a man look like a conqueror.”

  I asked, “Can you render the spot invisible?”

  “Know what I’d do with this? Sheep’s bones, burnt, beat all up into a powder, some vinegar maybe. You sift your powder onto the spot, press the cravat down with something heavy. Leave it lie for the night. In the morning, the powder, it all takes up the spot. You understand?”

  “It leaches the oils of the spot.”

  “You catch on quick, when it’s about leaching.” He laid the cravat on Mr. Sharpe’s bed and folded it carefully, running his thumbs over the creases. “You watch how this is done.”

  I followed him down to the parlor, where we kindled a fire for the ease of the academicians, who were retiring from the experimental chamber.

  As Bono loaded the wood onto the andirons, Mr. Sharpe inquired, “Bono, I wonder whether you have removed that stain from my neck-kerchief. The girl did not think it within her power.”

  “Nancy.”

  Mr. Sharpe nodded. “She did not think it within her power. The blot was beyond her.”

  “That’s some blot, sir.” Bono shook his head. “That is some terrible blot.”

  “You doubt whether even your art can remove it.”

  “See, sir, that ain’t your normal type of blot. It’s some kind of novel, philosophical blot.”

  “It resists your efforts.”

  “Oh, it’s fast.” Bono again shook his head. “What you want I should do with the cravat?”

  “You are certain there is no other recourse?”

  “Can’t be fixed, sir. But you could still wear it, Mr. Sharpe, sir, so long as you tuck it into your waistcoat, and so long as you don’t turn too quick, with surprise or delight or some such.”

  Mr. Sharpe swore and turned away.

  “Sir —,” said Bono, “sir, if you don’t have interest in it, would you object if I should wear it? I reckon I could wear it handsomely, if I keep my body held just right.”

  Mr. Sharpe waved his hand in reply.

  That night, we burned and pulverized sheep’s bones, doused the powder in a rendering of vinegar, and heaped the blot with the concoction. Two days later, Bono walked forth on errands with the cravat unspotted.

  It looked, indeed, fit for a conqueror.

  I aided in the pounding of boiled clothes; I translated dull tags; I daily ran my fingers through Mr. Sharpe’s hair, greasing it and feeding his graying queue into a bag. So the days passed in Greek fragments and chores.

  I missed my studies with Dr. Trefusis inveterately; for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family; and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one’s familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered.

  There being an intemperate storm one evening, I sat by the fire, recalling that just a few months before, such a night, the rain savage upon pane and sash, would have found me by the library fire reading ancient bestiaries: stories of the military endeavors of the crane, the violence of certain monkeys, and the peculiar blood of the hoopoe, who feeds on filth and whose gore, when spread on the human body, was said to cause visions of demons strangulating the dreamer with twine.

  That evening, a small company, consisting of Bono; my mother; the cook, Aina; and Nancy, the laundry-maid, sate by the fire in my mother’s room. There was a time when I would have cowered for fear that some adult should speak to me, that Mr. Gitney should badger me with questions, and so break my reverie, draw me back from Africa, Persia, or Muscovy; now, without books to leaven the evening, I sat listless.

  “What’s hypped the Prince?” asked Bono.

  My mother answered, “He misses his books.”

  “Prince O.,” said Bono. “Those books — you don’t need them. They’re madness without one lick of sense. Mr. Gitney told me I should read from the library. He tells me to read some romance; he wishes I should give him my opinion. I read it. Sweet Jesus. There was flying peoples and horses underground and trick swords and bosoms heaving. And there was battlements and the walking dead and oboes. It’s a game for the idle. Forget the books. You han’t need for children’s stories anymore. Leave them for the rich, Little O.”

  In that moment, my spirits rallied against him — stifled — agitated — vexed and bound — and I discovered dislike even for he who commanded so much of my reverence; I could not brook his slander upon learning.

  I must have glowered.

  Bono took a bite of an apple. “That child,” said he, through a mouth full of pulp, “could melt a liver with his eyes.”

  The next day the rain abated and commenced a silent drizzle. All the houses of the town were green in the mist. Figures in tricornes walked through the streets, gathering by carriages with curtains closed, and the smell of the docks hung over the squares.

  That evening, chilled to the bone, I prepared for bed near our fire. Bono sat upon his pallet.

  “O.,” he whispered, “how would you fancy the Something Fiddle-Faddle Histories of Tacitus?”

  I turned to him, smoothing my shirt.

  “Lift up your mattress.”

  I did; the book was there: Tacitus’s Annals of Rome.

  “There’s some good to be had in being a known cretin,” said Bono. “I been granted full reign of the library.”

  I picked up the book. I held it in both hands, the leather boards pressed between my palms.

  “Bono . . . ,” said I, deprived almost of speech — eager already for the plumes, the charges, the palace intrigues.

  “Don’t let them find it, or we ain’t walking straight for some days.”

  “Bono,” I began again.

  “You know there’s a price,” said he, reaching under his mattress and pulling forth another volume. “Before you read to yourself, you needs read to me.” He handed it to me.

  I looked through the book he had given me; it was a collection of old tales in English, so far as I could discern. “Why can you not read it yourself?” I aske
d.

  “It ain’t all in English,” he said. He took it from me, turned the pages rapidly, and passed the volume back to me. He thumped upon the page. Bono explained, “They put some of those passages in Latin so the ladies couldn’t read them. I got a most acute interest to know what they say.”

  I scanned the words, and, seeing their content, blushed.

  I informed him, “It is regrettably impossible that I should render these lines into English. I am sorry, Bono, and I hope that this in no wise diminishes your sensibility of my gratitude for the hazard in which you have —”

  “Octavian,” he said, “you translate, or I take Mr. Tacitus back to his own bedroom.” He tapped the cover of his fable-book. He said, “Miscreants got to hang together. Do wrong for me so I can do more wrong for you.”

  I watched him, burning with shame at my complicity; but there was no way out of this arrangement, should I wish to continue my education. And so I began reading — without joy — my tongue sunken in my mouth. “The monk . . . was of so great a girth . . . that the girl would have been crushed beneath him. . . . Thus she mounted atop him . . . and he penetrated her from beneath. . . .”

  This became a feature of my evenings. I read in secret volumes from the library, and, in return, once a week perhaps would translate filth or chirurgical surveys of the womb and parts of reproduction; and so, through these crimes, my studies continued in secret.

  Mr. Sharpe could not abide music; something in its vibrations agitated his animal spirits and contributed to his peevish disposition. When I practiced upon my violin, I did so in the top of the house, away from his apartments. In this secret music, I could tell those tales I was denied, and, there being no text, none could read whether I spake of docility or insubordination. I set myself tasks of description — thinking, I shall play this passage indicating the burning of bread, or, the collapse of a chimney, or, the stealing of evening upon the linen of a girl’s mob-cap in the alley as she whistles for her brother, or — This movement shall represent the march in triumph of a queen who sits upon a lily-throne.

  Thus, when Mr. Sharpe announced his visit to the garret where I played, I was deeply troubled, foreseeing that even this species of expression might be withdrawn. I knew that he had no liking for the violin, which instrument he called “the fiddle”; and that he had no liking for any but country dances, maintaining that the music of the concert hall, the chamber, and the chapel indulged nervous sophistication and confounded natural simplicity.

  He heard me play for several days in a row, interrupting sonatas by Locatelli and Leclair to request “Cup o’ Stingo” and “Cold and Raw.” On the last day, he was accompanied by a man I did not know. They traded some whispered intelligence as I played, and the music-master, seated at our dilapidated spinet, closed his eyes.

  The purpose of these visits quickly became clear. Mr. Sharpe, having heard reports of my success in years previous at our evening soirées and at the opera evening for Lord Cheldthorpe, had arranged for me to play as soloist for a subscription concert; the understanding being that, were my efforts received with the plaudits of the assembled, I should continue to appear in solo turns throughout the rest of the season.

  In this way, he explained, I should pay back the College of Lucidity for the kindness shown in feeding and clothing me, and they should recoup the expense of maintaining me.

  The uneasiness precipitated by the mere thought of such public performance disordered my nerves to a great degree, and I felt fearful of most everything. Sleep was impossible; study, too, suffered. My silence, at this point, was total; any scene which tended toward scrutiny, demonstration, and display was deeply repugnant to my current spirits.

  The violinist Signor Tartini, it is said, dreamed one night that Satan, the Father of Lies, had appeared to him in sleep, crouching on his highboy, and instructed him on the art of the violin, playing in the course of the lesson a melody of astounding seduction. Waking from the dream, Tartini attempted to recollect the fugitive motives of this diabolic sonata, but could not — and wrote instead, from those fragments, his sonata, infamous for its difficulty, called “The Devil’s Trill.” It was this which was slated on the program for my first appearance — so I was informed by Mr. Sharpe.

  The difficulties of execution were not insuperable; but I feared that there should be no vigor in my rendering when my senses were clogged with terror at crowds and a crippling imagination of imminent failure. I imagined the silence of the hall when I struck the last chord; my bow wavering in silence; and me standing alone before the faces of a mob unimpressed by my exertions.

  It eased me not a bit to discover I was being fit with a new suit of clothes for the concert. I stood with my arms spread wide and let the tailors measure me. They lay various stuffs against my skin to determine hue. The principal item in the outfit was a frock-coat of black silk with crimson trim. It did not help to hear my mother carp about the colors.

  “He will look,” she said, “like a city parson at the racetrack. Someone who puts his money on horses named after the Patriarchs.”

  “No commentary from the mother,” said Mr. Sharpe.

  “It is barbaric to press the child into playing,” said my mother. “Is not his fear evident? He will run distracted. He cannot sleep.”

  But Mr. Sharpe would listen to none of her importuning nor mine; and so the dreaded night approached.

  From the steaming and corrosive blood of the Gorgon Medusa, most terrible to behold, she whose serpent-fringed visage incited petrifaction in all who gazed upon it, arose Pegasus, noblest of steeds, who alone could loft mortals to the heights of Mount Parnassus; in the same way, often that which most we fear births the resolve that spurs us on to altitudes we could not have achieved, had we continued walking on our customary paths.

  On the evening of the concert, I was dressed with much fanfare. Bono stood behind me as I dressed. He laid his hands upon my shoulders, our two heads encompassed by the mirror; my ebon frock-coat glistening anew in the candlelight.

  “Make them howl,” he said.

  In the coach, my mother took my hand. Mr. Gitney and Mr. Sharpe sat across from us, clearly disordered by an excitation of nerves almost as extreme as my own.

  “One word,” said Mr. Sharpe. “I have taken the liberty of informing the impresario that you acquired your astounding musical facility in one night through conversation with the Devil at a crossroads.”

  I gaped at him.

  “Pardon?” demanded my mother.

  “Do nothing to disabuse the public of this notion.”

  I said softly, “Sir, I labored for —”

  “The common man likes a story,” declared Sharpe. “As much as your Puritan Boston admires labor, there are times when the price of a commodity may be increased by concealing honest hard work. Work is not seductive. We wish to give the people some magic.”

  “This is outrageous,” said my mother, turning to the window.

  “Hence the garb,” said Sharpe, betraying some pride. “The Devil is commonly supposed to be a black man in habilements of black, playing the fiddle.”

  “Hence also,” said my mother, “the ‘Devil’s Trill’ sonata.”

  “Precisely,” said Sharpe. “It is all one beautiful package.”

  “This does,” said Mr. Gitney, “seem somewhat irregular, Dick.”

  “It is my hope,” Mr. Sharpe said, “that it shall be weekly.”

  It was a warm night, wet, and all glistened from a recent rain. The windows of the houses we passed were lit, and I could snatch glimpses of quiet lives — a mother clearing a table, or men gesticulating with their pipes. Three children, arrayed in size, stood on their stoop in the spring air, eating cakes.

  “Remember beauty,” Mr. Sharpe instructed me. “Perhaps — know you what I like particularly? When notices in the newspapers describe a fiddler playing like fire coursed from his fingertips. Is that not inspiring? Your average concert enthusiast does not want to hear your melancholy perversities and
pranks. Dazzle them, Octavian. Sweetness and light. Cheerful and gay. (A) Sweetness. (B) Light. See? This is the way to their hearts.”

  The carriage made its way through the streets of the town.

  Cheerful and gay. Sweetness and light. These words stood before me like a rebuke of everything I loved in music. I held them before me as we pulled up by Faneuil Hall. I took my teeth around them as I sat behind a column at the theater, waiting to step out and play. I meditated upon them when I made my way out before the orchestra, before the silent multitude of Boston’s finest citizens. I gazed before me, and, holding the bow aloft above the strings, envisioned Mr. Sharpe’s gray face, turned to the side, as he instructed me, “Remember beauty. Sweetness and light. Cheerful and gay”— and I began the sonata.

  I played the first movement like the lolling of a suicide’s head in the tub, the corpse lukewarm, the roseate water lapping at the slackened lips. The melody was adorned in equal measure by the harshness of tone and a dismal, languorous mistuning with which I plagued all but the uneasy cadences. It is little marked upon how much skill must be exercised to produce the most piquant malformations.

  The second movement, a more lively one as written by Signor Tartini, somewhat a dance, I played like the kicking of a turtle-headed spawn in a woman’s womb.

  Dissatisfaction marked the few attentive faces I could discern in the gloom.

  The third movement contained the much-dreaded trill, rapid and triple-stopped, which gave the piece its name. My tone was dry and hoarse, a febrile scratching; the trill itself I began as an insect rattle, almost inaudible — a single fly that sups on the hand; then the rattle grew — swarming — grotesque — the air ateem with carrion-flies, swooping, crawling, rejoicing in Beelzebub their Master.

  I gave them their Devil’s Trill.

  With a final, melancholic sawing, the piece was over.

  The applause, perhaps, lacked something of the vigor, the generosity and celebratory ebullience it had in my previous performance. The clapping soon ended.