spines bore titles in bright or fading shades of gold. These she and my father played on a fancy cabinet model Atwater Kent electric phonograph, “superheterodyne,” advanced in sound for the day but tending toward fogginess unless the steel needle was changed after a dozen or so discs. There was to me no corny iconolatry in the plaster busts of Schubert, of Beethoven, of Brahms; if they were the saints my mother worshiped, their presence was manifestly justified. Atop the piano there were photographs, framed, inscribed. These she had acquired as others collect pictures of Hollywood divinities. Für Adelaide, read one, above chicken scratches in German, signed Gustav Mahler, a scholarly-looking man with a pleasant, slightly insane gleam. Another: To Adelaide Whitehurst, with kindest regards, Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Arturo Toscanini, fierce. Fritz Kreisler, gemütlich. Lotte Lehmann, fatuously regal. One picture with no inscription save the place and year—Vienna, 1904—always held my gaze, since it showed my young mother herself in a garland of brown braids, with eyeglasses and dressed in a bosomy high-collared blouse and long pleated skirt, smiling a bright-toothed smile that was clearly a smile of sheer infatuation for the whiskered old satyr against whose paunch she leaned—her voice teacher, one Herr “Rudi” Reichardt. It was he who, one sweet and priceless day over thirty years before, had introduced her to Mahler. Squinting down, I saw that the sheet of music on the piano was from Schubert’s Winterreise. I was still only half-educated, musically speaking. I had not yet really made myself familiar with the songs my mother sang, the seemingly limitless outpouring of Lieder by Schubert and Schumann and Brahms and a dozen others that she had let spring forth from that little room, in her lovely, clear contralto, a sound that always seemed to me to possess an actual coloration, opalescent, like pearl. They all flowed in and out of one another, these unfathomable songs; I could name just a few of them. They were linked together only by a voice that gave them a sometimes festive, sometimes somber tenderness. Few people in the village cared for such music or listened to it seriously; even so, no one considered my mother odd or freakish, and in fact once in a while children would gather along the fence of our backyard, along with a few grown-ups, and listen to her, clapping when she finished with mild but real appreciation for these joyous and plaintive tunes, these alien lyrics so far removed from the aesthetic of the Lucky Strike Program and Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, Guy Lombardo, and other porridge oozing from the radio. But her music, and therefore her chief pleasure in life, had been dealt a fearful blow a couple of years before. One afternoon she tripped and fell in one of her flower beds. It should have been a harmless tumble but it wasn't; the cancer had begun to riddle her bones, and her leg was broken beyond any hope of mending. And so the brace she was compelled to put on, a gruesome contraption of steel and leather straps that she had to wear when standing or walking, or when she was propped up at a right angle while sitting, kept her thereafter from playing the piano at all. This caused her wicked distress, but it didn’t entirely daunt her. She was so indefatigably wed to her songs that often she simply sang without accompaniment; harmony was lost but the fine voice carried on, weakening and fading away only as her body itself was overcome by feebleness and she could walk no more. One of my last memories of her before she became bedridden for good was of her standing in her garden, amid the vivid May blooms and darting hummingbirds and the fidget of bees. Her back was to me, for a while she was motionless, and then she took one or two hobbled steps with her brace and cane. At once, from the way she bowed her head, I knew she was going to sing. There was an indrawn breath, a faltering
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