Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

erect and imperatorial as some benevolent, sharp-eyed Slavonic king, moving slowly, favoring the old woman who crept along beside him, clinging to his arm; and seeing Buddy Orrick seated on the bench, his books and French horn in its tattered black case on the floor beside him, he would extend his left arm regally and boom, “Good morning!” like a genial but not-to-be-ignored command.

Buddy, who had risen at first sight of Yegudkin, would say shyly, “Morning,sir.”

“You haff met my wife, Mrs. Yegudkin?” the old man would say, taking the great black cigar from his mouth. He asked it each Saturday, month after month.

“Yes sir. How do you do.”

The old man was too deaf to play in orchestras anymore. “Hvatt’s the difference,” he said. “Every symphony in America, they got a Yegudkin. In Hollywood at the movies, my boys play horn for twelve dollars a minute. Who teaches them to make so much money? The General!”

He would sit in the chair beside Buddy’s and would sing, with violent muscular gestures and a great upward leap of the diaphragm to knock out high notes—Tee! Tee!—as Buddy read through Kopprasch, Gallay, and Kling, and when it was time to stop, give Buddy’s lip a rest, Yegudkin would speak earnestly, with the same energy he put into his singing, of the United States and Russia. The world was filled, in the late forties and early fifties, with Russophobes, and Yegudkin, whenever he read a paper, would be so filled with rage at the stupidity of man he could barely contain himself. “In all my age,” he sometimes said, furiously gesturing with his black cigar, “if the Russians would come to this great country of America, I would take up a gun and shot at them—boof boof! But the newspapers telling you lies just the same. You think they are dumb fools, these Russians? You think they big fat-face bush-overs?” He spoke of mile-long parades of modern, terrifying implements of war, spoke of Russian cunning, the beauty of Russia’s oldest cities, spoke with great scorn, a sudden booming laugh, of Napoleon. What it all meant Buddy Orrick could hardly have told you, at the time, and since he never answered, merely agreed politely with whatever the General might say, the General probably had no idea at all of where Buddy stood on these matters of such importance. Nevertheless, he raged on, taking great pleasure in his rage, sometimes talking like a rabid Communist, sometimes like a rabid anti-Communist fascist, sometimes like a poor citizen helplessly caught between mindless, grinding forces. Then abruptly he would stop, and Buddy would raise his horn and they’d go back to work. He put Buddy in the Eastman Junior Symphony (Howard Hanson would remember him years afterward as having always played sharp) and got him paying, though not very well-paying, jobs with small orchestras.

The General rarely played for his students, though even at the time Buddy Orrick studied with him, when Yegudkin was in his seventies and no longer performed in public, the old man claimed he practiced six, seven hours every day. Buddy heard him once. A new horn he’d ordered from Germany, an Alexander, arrived at his office—a horn he’d ordered for a graduate student. The old man unwrapped and assembled it, the student looking on, and the look in the General’s eyes was like madness, or at any rate lust, perhaps gluttony. When the horn was ready he went to the desk where he kept his clippings, tools for the repair of French horns, cigars, photographs, and medals, and pulled open a wide, shallow drawer. In it he had perhaps a hundred mouthpieces, of all sizes, shapes, and colors, from raw brass to lucite, silver, and gold, from the shallowest possible cup to the deepest. He selected one, fitted it into the horn, pressed the rim of the bell into the right side of his large belly so firmly that the horn was more a part of him than the limb of a maple is a part of the tree, clicked the valve keys a moment to get the feel of them, and played. In that large, cork-lined room, it was as if, suddenly, some awesome creature from another sphere of reality, some world where spirit is more solid than stone, had revealed itself. The sound was not loud but was too big for a French horn, as it seemed to Buddy Orrick. Too big for a hundred French horns, in fact. It fluttered and flew crazily, like an enormous trapped bird hunting wildly for escape. It flew to the bottom of the French horn register, the foundation concert F very few among even the best can play, and went below it, and on down, as if the horn in Yegudkin’s hands had no bottom, and then suddenly changed its mind and flew upward in a split-second, absolutely flawless run to the horn’s top E or concert A, dropped back to the middle and then ran once more, more fiercely at the E, and this time crashed through it as a terrified bird might crash through a skylight, and fluttered, manic, in the trumpet’s high range, then lightly dropped back into its own home range, and abruptly, in the middle of a note, stopped.

“Good horn,” said Yegudkin, and put it in its case.

Buddy Orrick stared. Timidly he said, “You think I’ll ever learn to play like that?”

Yegudkin smiled, beatific. “No,” he said.

Nine

One of Buddy Orrick’s virtues—though he was then unaware that he had any virtues—was that he couldn’t be discouraged by the knowledge that he was destined never to be the greatest French horn player, or the greatest anything else, in the world. Nothing in his background demanded anything like greatness of him. His Grandmother Orrick had been a good, honest lawyer, as some of his cousins would be the best country or, later, city lawyers they knew how to be, but with no strong urge to become flashy trial lawyers who defended rich murderers in spectacular