a minute, doesn’t particularly like it, then doesn’t like it at all and turns the radio off. Sometimes what to him is awful music can be depressing. This station plays a lot of it, most of it in the morning till around ten—oompah marches, schmaltzy waltzes—although it plays a lot of good music too. As for becoming a member, he and his wife have been one for about twenty-five years, though he now takes the senior citizen membership. But the story. If his wife were here he’d ask her about the Rachmaninoff piece. She’s the Chekhov expert. His stories are what she did her master’s and doctorate on: her thesis on the beginnings of his stories—about twenty of them—and her dissertation on the endings: ten. He’d say “Do you know of a Chekhov story called ‘Along the Way’? I don’t. And how can a symphonic tone poem, which is what I always called them, be based on a short story? Especially one with a plot like what the announcer gave, for we’re not talking opera here, which seems mostly like a long conversation between a man and woman in an inn and ends with the man standing in what I assume’s deep snow and looking like a rock.” She might say she’s read more than 300 of his stories and sketches in Russian—she once told him that—and about half the 400 or so translated into English, and the one he mentions isn’t familiar to her, although the ending is like several of his. “‘Along the Way’? Are you sure the announcer didn’t give another title? Though there are a number of his stories that have different titles for each new translation of it. ‘Grief,’ for instance, which I’ve also seen as ‘Heartache’ and ‘Misery,’ and in one translation, ‘Sadness,’ though I could be wrong on the last one. I know there are at least four different titles for it in the English versions. If you want, I’ll go through my notes on his short stories, and if I don’t find anything I’ll look at my story collections of his, both in Russian and English. If I find the story in English, do you want to read it?” He’d say “I would, and then maybe you could read it for the first or second time and we’ll talk about it. That’s always fun. And it won’t be a waste of time. I’ve never read a story of his, except for some of the minor sketches, which aren’t stories, right?—that wasn’t anything but clear and readable and good, and twenty to thirty of them were great. I don’t think I can say that about any other short story writer. Maybe Hemingway and Babel come closest.” So she’d check, she might say, maybe not now but by the end of the day. She has the entire 16– or 17–, or whatever the number is—he could go into her study and find out—volume collection of all of Chekhov’s stories and sketches in Russian. He’ll check the collections of Chekhov’s stories he has in English. He goes into the living room, pulls the three collections off a bookshelf and finds the title “On the Way” on the contents page of one of them. Has to be it. He turns to the last pages of the story. A man, standing in a snowfall “as if rooted to the spot” and gazing at the tracks left by the woman’s sledge-runners, soon begins to resemble a white boulder. He then reads the first few pages of the story, flips through the rest of it and goes into her study with the book. “Hurray, hurray,” he says, “I found it. In an old Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s stories that I think I bought when I was in college, translated by that old reliable, Constance Garnett. Or I think it was by her. It doesn’t say who the translators are, except for around five of the stories on the acknowledgments page, and she’s got all of them but one. Maybe it’s at the end of the book,” and he looks and it isn’t. “But it’s almost got to be by her. The copyright is 1932.” “Nothing out of the usual,” she might say, although she’s gone in to this before. “And other than for the top translators today, who are almost as well known as the authors, things haven’t changed much since. Translators were always poorly paid and often didn’t get credited in the book. But woe is me if the translation didn’t read that well or the story in the original wasn’t that good. Then they got the blame. ‘Sloppily translated’; that type of criticism—the writer, of course, getting off free. Let me see it.” He holds open the story to the first page. “Oh, yes,” she might say, maybe after reading a paragraph or two, “now I remember it. Not one of my favorites, which is why I never taught it in class, but still, as you said, a good story. Two people at an inn during a tremendous snowstorm. Howling wind. He relied on that a lot. Also the storm beating on the windows and roof. If he had a weakness, it was that. The woman’s supposed to be a good deal younger than the man, who’s described as elderly, though he’s in his forties, so maybe only old for that time and place. She’s a landowner, or her brother is, whom she’s traveling to by sledge. The man was once fairly prosperous—I believe he even once owned an estate, or ran one—but for a long time has been down on his luck. At first they don’t seem to be a likely match. But by the end, because they’re so kind and frank and helpful and even solicitous to each other, you think, if you didn’t know Chekhov better, they might team up. I don’t think it ever happens in Chekhov, in his fiction or plays, or it’s rare when it does. He’s traveling with his young daughter. A very nice little girl, but sad, like so many children in his stories—so put upon and being dragged all over the place by her father.” “The synopsis of the story the announcer gave,” he says, “never mentioned the daughter. She probably didn’t have the time, or the program notes for the Rachmaninoff piece didn’t say so.” “If I remember correctly,” she might say, “the woman has some money of her own and is very sympathetic to the young girl and would have made a wonderful surrogate mother to her and a good wife to the man. I forget what happened to the man’s wife. I think she died or deserted him for someone else, and he was left with the daughter. That would explain his descent.” “What I’d like to know is how you make a symphonic tone poem out of a story like that,” he says. “An opera, as I said—a one-act one—I can see, although the snow might be a problem.” “Oh,” she might say, “they know how to do snow on an opera stage.
La Bohème, for instance. But I have to confess I don’t really know what a tone poem is.” “I guess what Richard Strauss did in his
Don Juan and
Till Eulenspiegel and so on, and what Sibelius and Smetana did in theirs. A narrative in music, though I’d think it’d be a very difficult form to put across. But we’ll forget the music and read the story—I’ve already started it and I know how it turns out—and talk about it sometime today?” “You finish it and I’ll catch up,” she might say. “I’ll also read it in Russian, if I have the time, in case the translation misses some of it.” “See you later, then,” he says. He goes into their bedroom, plumps up and piles the four bed pillows, her two and his, on top of one another against the wall, and lies back on them and reads the story. After he finishes it he goes back to her study. She’s not there.
Cape May
They used to go to Cape May about once every two years, mostly to observe birds at the bird observatory there. Went three times, once in the spring and twice in the fall, before she got too sick to go. It wasn’t something he much liked doing: standing on the beach for a couple of hours in the morning and then in the afternoon, sometimes when it was cold, trying to find birds through the binoculars he’d bought her. Also, dragging her in her wheelchair through the sand to a spot she wanted to see the birds from, and then dragging the chair back to the paved path, sometimes with the help of a birder or two. She didn’t mind the cold, or said she didn’t. He’d tuck in her afghan around her chest, wrap her mohair shawl around her shoulders and neck, pull her wool cap down over her ears and put her gloves on for her. “You warm enough?” he’d say, or something like it, and she’d say “Now I am. Thank you. So let’s go find a bird we’ve never seen.” There were always lots of birders on the beach, no matter how cold it was, some with what seemed like expensive binoculars and others with elaborate telescopes on tripods. Sometimes one birder would be operating two or three telescopes, all pointed in different directions. Everyone out there was very friendly and nice and most seemed to know a lot about the birds they’d come to watch and photograph. Some would ask her if she wanted to look through their telescopes: they had them focused on a bird’s nest or bird in a tree or hidden in a bush, sometimes hundreds of feet away. Maybe not that far, but a good distance, certainly far enough away where it couldn’t be seen without a highpowered telescope or binoculars, which hers weren’t. He doesn’t think she ever saw a bird through one of these telescopes, which he did, several times. For one thing, her eyes were bad because of her MS. And because she was sitting in a wheelchair she usually couldn’t get her eye close enough to the
