Wandering to the other side of the room, fingering the stacks of sheet music and the bound volumes, Judge Mann reflected that a judgeship is a very damned comfortable thing, to the nerves of pocketbook and of vanity, until a moment of self-appraisal brings you the image of a bewildered monkey in a black gown. An image caught as though in multiple mirrors. No good turning your head aside: a mirror in every wall, and the monkey, poor puzzled well-meaning bastard, in every mirror.
He did not want now the fury or grief or laughter of Beethoven; not now the lofty tenderness or robust passion of Johannes Brahms. He took down his one-volume edition of the Well-Tempered Clavichord and glanced at a memory-stirring litter of pencil marks made long ago in the curly script of his teacher Michael Brooks. Mr. Brooks had died before the war, very old and partly blind. He might live another hundred years in these marks, far longer in the spreading influence of his fifty years of teaching, the impetus he gave to other lives continuing beyond any knowledge or measuring. Very good, Terence!... More slow trill practice absolutely essential!! Andante does not mean Adagio. In this Prelude schmaltz is possible but I do not like it. Excellent but you could do better. Bring out the inner voices.
Mr. Brooks grew vivid in memory, speaking with difficulty and panting breath because of age and the burden of fat that seemed (till you learned better) as though it might block his pudgy improbable hands away from the keyboard entirely. He had been seventy when Terence at age eight began lessons; he went on teaching twelve years thereafter. Terence remembered the gray eyes, tiny-appearing, sometimes inflamed, in folds of drooping lids and fat, the completely hairless skull rising to a peak, the wondrously ugly features that after the first impact of astonishment left the word "ugly" without meaning. "You think the Fugues are dry, Terence? Bring out the inner voices.... See, Terence, all the composers have something for you. But when you are unhappy—" blinking, sighing, coughing; and Terence recalled a child's botheration, dread of giggles, at an old man's prolonged throat-clearing, guttural noises, conversational spray, habit of patting forlornly at the air when a needed word was gone from him—"or when you have discovered that happiness is only a sometime thing at best, not too important, then try Bach, Terence, try Bach. Because he will let you enter a place where you become bigger than sadness or happiness. And bring out the inner voices."
He set the old book on the piano. Hands and brain were tired, the hour late, though the neighboring apartment-dwellers were tolerant and often kept their mechanical music perking until after midnight. For a while he was in that place: Well, Mr. Brooks, "container and thing contained": aren't we always bigger than what stirs within us? All the same it was a good way to talk to a child. But the very facility of his hands betrayed him, leaving his mind too free. Good at first, to continue private thought while Bach was speaking, but then only another troublesome dividing of the self.
Terence's father, not a patient man, would have said at this point or sooner: "God-sake, Terry, make up your mind!"
He would have said that, before 1928. In that year Father changed. And maybe the gray and harassed man could have entertained doubts earlier in his life on such an issue as capital punishment. He didn't have a closed or ungenerous mind; he couldn't afford to, a small-town doctor with two skittish growing boys and a wife who came to believe herself in deep other-worldly communication with Mary Queen of Scots. But many of Father's opinions were formed when he was a young man in the era of Teddy Roosevelt, and he didn't always remember to speak softly. Unlike his older brother Uncle Norden, who must have early learned the advantages of speaking softly at great length—anyhow Uncle Nord built up that accomplishment into a thundering good law practice.
Father (before 1928) would likely have said if you asked him that criminals so hardened as to commit murder—oh, put 'em out. For the good of society. Human failures: the unfit—odd word much loved by the nineteenth century, used apparently in a sort of gentleman's agreement that no one was going to ask: unfit for what? Father would not have spoken so out of vindictiveness or lack of human feeling: just the impatient judgment of a busy man with troubles of his own, who accepted a number of antique notions because he grew up with them. That few hardened criminals ever commit murder, that most murderers have acted on a blinding impulse unlikely to recur—such facts would have been outside his mental territory, and unacceptable. Knowledge of what Father would have said was for Terence a bloodstream thing, no longer traceable to any remembered words. Like most people including doctors, Dr. Carl Mann had never witnessed an execution, nor known anyone well who wound up in jail. Gentlemen don't.
After Elinor Mann's final breakdown and commitment, Father no longer announced his views with much positiveness. In that year 1928 the bottom fell out; Dr. Mann couldn't even get positive about Al Smith, in spite of a long-standing rage at the imbecilities of Prohibition. When not meeting the heavy demands of a country medical practice, he was beating out heart and brain in a private crucifixion, asking himself the wrong questions: What could I have done differently? Where did I fail her? As though a clarification of his own past might even then help to restore Elinor's mind, that had never really tolerated the difficulties of living before it made permanent retreat into the smoke of paranoid fantasy.