A Sail to Great Island

Pavane

7 Pavane The first time I heard Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess I was in band practice at Lawrence High School. Our stands held the dog-eared parts—Horn 1 & 2 and Solo Horn, which George Gellis got to play so soulfully that Sue Meyer, Jane Furchgott, and I hated to add our uncertain sound. Some days I was in love with Jane who was angelically pretty but had an acne problem. And Sue was my friend, the older sister I’d gladly have traded my real sister for. The first time I heard that melody glide like a river of silk out of George Gellis’s horn I couldn’t understand how it had been given to an arrogant senior, who either despised or simply ignored me, to say the saddest, most beautiful thing that had ever been said. How could he know it, or translate it off the page? And I never envied anything more than to play that melody with that sound as if George had been sheathed in golden armor and I, with a few bars of accompaniment, was his page. Music aside, I wanted a sorrow that mournful for my own. And two years later, when Sue went off to college and died freshman year falling through the ice at a school camp in northern Michigan while walking across the lake at night with her boyfriend, I would sit at the piano and swoon out that Pavane. Always it brought her back to me, and I count up my life since I was seventeen, the age she died, as though I could answer her last letter to me again. She came to my room once, to talk to me about my crush on Jane, as though she might have had a crush on me. Unreasonable, but what if we’d started to make out? Would she have been walking with someone so late that icy night? Out flow the bars of the Pavane, George Gellis’s one reason for being in the world. 8 She must be a young favorite there in the world of the dead— so level-headed, yet idealistic. If I could write to her, answering the card with the Japanese print of men in the snow that I keep inside New Directions 16, a volume she inscribed to me, I’d begin, Sue, I think of you whenever I hear the Ravel piece, as though it marks your grave (wherever in Michigan that is). If Jane’s still alive, and if she still thinks of you, that would make two of us who remember the day when Mr. Jones, on a dull afternoon, as though he wanted to hear George Gellis play just once before he graduated (knowing he’d only have the three of us left in the horn section next year), passed out the band version of Ravel’s Pavane, and George (a musician who, as far as I know, had no feelings) filled the Lawrence High auditorium with somber beauty. You must have joined the rest of us to accompany him, none of us managing to be any more in-tune than usual, with those dented instruments we’d borrowed from the school’s storeroom. But it seemed to me (as it does today) that I’d always remember you— how, with Jane and me, when our cues came, you put your lips to your horn and blew the spirit of your life into that music. ...