Long Ago and Far Away by Timothy White

Author:Timothy White [White, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-006-9
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2001-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

16

There We Are

Evidence of love. It is the strongest asset, finest achievement and most lasting legacy of any relationship. Without it, there is no peace, no satisfaction, no resolution, no getting close in generosity, or letting go in joy. The greatest relationship of all is the family, because it is the only organic school capable of teaching all the modes and means of unselfish love.

Without evidence of unselfish love, one has family in name or façade only, and within such families, one tastes the bitterest fruits of human existence: maturity without true growth, materialism at its most piteously grasping, and the betrayal of trust in its most vulnerable places.

In the presence of unselfish love, there is a kind of music. With evidence of unselfish love, there is the possibility of more such music. But without such evidence, there is only, at best, the sound of someone else’s music, echoing in an empty place. And that is something very different indeed. Carly Simon grew up hearing her father Richard playing someone else’s music on a grand piano in their gracious Riverdale home, and it still reverberates down through the decades. Repeating and repeating.

Richard Simon was one of five children born to Leo Simon, a well-to-do manufacturer and importer of the silk flowers and marabou (West African heron) feathers that were leading decorative elements in hats, dresses and fashion accessories in America and Europe between the 1830s and 1930s. While Richard’s father permitted musical instruments in the family brownstone on Manhattan’s West 87th Street and had no quibbles with weekly visits for himself or his children at the New York Philharmonic, he forbade Richard from pursuing his dream of a career as a classical pianist.

Entranced by Frederic Chopin and marathon practice sessions, Richard had natural talent and the vigorous hands and long tensile fingers ideal for the keyboard. He was wont to put his full six-foot-four-inch frame into the full-pressure grandeur of Chopin’s mazurkas, ballades, nocturnes, concertos, polonaises, and solo études. It was his first love. But his parent said playing the piano, even with the Philharmonic, was unsuitable as a source of income for anyone hoping to provide for a family.

Richard might have cultivated an ally in his mother, Anna, but she died when he was 18. So Leo Simon’s domineering word held sway in the household on 87th Street, where he invited his wife’s best friend, a Swiss woman named Jo Hutmacher, to come to live and act as surrogate mother to Leo’s younger children. This, Miss Hutmacher did. She also became the secret paramour of tall, insecure teenager Richard, initiating him into sex.

This near Oedipal trysting was still in place in the 1920s, as Richard, now a graduate of Columbia University, was making his way in a profession that was a pale substitute for his heart’s desire; he was a piano salesman for the Aeolian company, in whose West 42nd Street building Richard met trade magazine publisher Max Lincoln Schuster.

Schuster’s dad ran a stationery shop in Harlem but he was a bright, resourceful man and a voracious reader.

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