Midstream by Reynolds Price

Author:Reynolds Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Samuel Barber, a few years after Reynolds first met him. They toyed for a while with collaborating on an opera for Leontyne Price, but Barber eventually opted for Shakespeare as his librettist.

It was around one o’clock. As I set down my small bag, Sam sped through our immediate options. If I cared to move fast, we could have a quick Dubonnet here, go out for lunch, then head quickly north to 155th Street where the American Academy of Arts and Letters was staging its annual spring prize day—Eudora Welty would be there to award the gold medal for fiction to William Faulkner who’d waited a long while to get it. He was sixty-four and the Nobel committee in Stockholm had tapped him twelve years before his native Academy had seen fit to gild him. So I could see Eudora for the first time in years; maybe I could even shake hands with a man I’d known to be a genius since I first read The Sound and the Fury at Harvard summer school in ’54, a genius who nonetheless hardly warmed my heart.

I washed up, drank my first ever glass of Dubonnet while Sam questioned me in detail about the France (he often went to Europe in ships). By the time we headed to lunch, I felt that I liked him, though the feeling was jostled as Sam made an unkind remark about Stephen while hailing a taxi. We crossed town and took our seats in an enjoyably ludicrous restaurant near Rockefeller Center. It was called the Forum of the Twelve Caesars (the ice buckets were mock gladiator’s helmets). The food was good but not overwhelming for someone only two weeks from Rome and a few hours from the France. I’d expected Sam to launch soon into some discussion of an opera; but we talked on about a good deal else, including his keen-eyed reading of my novel (I’d soon learn how widely Sam read in contemporary fiction).

The Academy was swarming when we got there—its famous members (writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and composers), their partners and guests, and the hundreds of assorted fans whom I’d later learn were avid attendants at any open function on 155th Street at Riverside Drive. The first hand I shook near the door was the poet Richard Wilbur’s; and then Sam guided me into a room where I spotted Eudora in a bottle-green dress and went straight toward her. At the time she was fifty-three years old, we’d only met a few times in 1955, and now she seemed pleasant but cooler than I remembered—it was my introduction to her shyness in crowds. Older friends came up steadily to greet her, but I had time to notice sadly that she’d developed a spinal problem since our last meeting—what my mother would have called a “widow’s hump.” When I met other friends of Eudora in forthcoming years, almost no one (but a physician at a party in Nashville) mentioned her problem to me. It was osteoporosis,

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