Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach

Author:Doris Grumbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497676701
Publisher: Open Road Media

The morning of Commencement Day was beautiful, cool, and clear. We traveled by trolley car along Broadway to Morningside Heights and walked through the great gates to the new Seth Low Library to meet the president, Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler. Weeks was there with other faculty members from the department of music. I was given a ticket to the chairs set up at the foot of the library steps. When I found my place, there was Catherine Weeks. I sat beside her. She asked after Robert’s condition and seemed to wish to explore the subject of his apparent ill health (it is uncharitable of me, but I felt she was the kind of sour woman who enjoyed the spectacle of other people’s misfortunes). But before I was required to say very much, the music—trumpets and horns—started. We rose to our feet to attend the glittering procession of garbed professors and students. Walking near the head was Robert, looking pallid and gaunt in his black academic mortarboard with a gold tassel falling before his eyes. He wore a handsome blue robe decorated with the crowns of King’s College, for so this university had been named at its inception, I read in the engraved program handed to me when I entered. Robert’s forehead was wet with perspiration; I was sorry he had insisted on dressing in his old but still fine German suit. He was going to be very warm up there, I thought.

I sat through the opening of the ceremony feeling very hot, too, for the sun was beating down on us at that hour. I felt uneasy for Robert. Always before, as I had waited in audiences for him to perform or conduct, I was confident, knowing well his perfect control, his quiet command of all his powers. But after the night in the railway car my confidence was shaken. How would he do?

At last—it seemed to me a very long wait in that hot sun—President Butler rose to read the awards of honorary degrees. I was delighted that Robert’s was read first. The citation was glowing and effusive. “Robert Glencoe Maclaren is one of America’s great composers. He has turned his excellent European training to the service of American music, American themes and subject matter. America’s Orpheus, he has been called by one critic, and his future,” read President Butler from a parchment scroll, “promises to be as distinguished as have been the short years of his already eminent career. He is a man whose thirty-three years of life are studded with world-recognized accomplishments.”

I watched Robert, seated in the front row on the platform, as the president read. He was looking straight ahead into the audience, listening perhaps, but somehow I felt he did not hear what the president was reading. The president stopped, there was applause. Mr. Butler looked over at Robert, expecting him to rise and come forward. The audience applauded loudly, but Robert did not rise. I saw a professor seated behind him lean over to shake his arm and whisper something.

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