Still to Love: For J. D. McClatchy

95 e’d bought tickets for My Fair Lady months before, the day had come, and he wanted badly to go. Going out as planned—to the theater in particular, and to musical theater above all—was not merely desirable but a responsibility. You do what you say you’ll do. You show up for life. Outside, late afternoon spring sun fell on young people in pu≠ shirts and harem pants who had stopped to peer into the windows of a new boutique across the street just visible beneath the drawn shade, their backs to the darkened room. Still to Love For J. D. McClatchy Langdon Hammer essay H 96 | LANGDON HAMMER Alphabetical in twenty-foot-tall shelves on the far side of the room were, I calculated, more than five thousand books. I o≠ered to read aloud from one. Maybe one of the novels on the side table, Dombey and Son or The Portrait of a Lady? Elizabeth Bishop’s letters? Something by a friend—Lorrie Moore, Ed White, James Merrill? Or why not read his own work? Maybe that libretto lying on the floor in a fresh printout, the tender, rueful story of a woman whose life slips past while one wish after another, magically granted, turns out to have been a mistake, and irrevocable. Isabella you wanted to call it. Nothing doing. “I have to get up. It takes me so long now to dress.” Then, in honest perplexity: “What do people wear to the theater these days?” Tubes connected his belly to plastic bags, one slack with fluid, another swollen taut with air. He kept pressing forward. His bedclothes slipped this way and that, dissolving and re-forming like the current of a river too deep and swift to cross— he, who had always been so tall and strong, “a smiling public man,” used to getting his way. I told him, once again, to lie back. He turned to me, narrowing his eyes, and said, “I will never forgive you for this.” After a while, Chip came home and sat next to him, he relaxed, we watched Jeopardy and Chopped, and he slept. when he was a child, going to the theater was Sandy McClatchy’s greatest pleasure, whether with his parents and his sisters or by himself. (“Any way I could.”) He played Everyman in his Catholic high school staging of the medieval play, but he wasn’t an actor, or particularly “theatrical,” if that means having a penchant for moody gestures and melodrama. He was too busy and practical for that. Theater was a point of view, a way of understanding people, including himself. We are all characters, he might have said. We have our roles to play, to which we are bound, and of which we are at best half-aware, even while everyone else knows just what to expect from us. No wonder he responded instinctively to opera, and why he so loved writing for it, beginning with William Shuman’s A Question STILL TO LOVE | 97 of Taste in 1988. As a boy at his first opera, he had presented himself backstage for the soprano Anna Mo≠o’s signature. Now he was in the business himself, and he relished it: conference calls, dress rehearsals, last-minute cuts and additions, not to mention the first-class flights to London and Milan, and big-league paychecks. With temperamental composers, calculating agents, and delicate or domineering stars, working in the opera was like being in an opera. He took a bow on opening night, clasping hands with the singers, maestro, and composer. Although he worked on commission and didn’t pick his themes, his operas spoke for him. Take Ned Rorem’s Our Town, based on Thornton Wilder’s play. Sandy’s libretto preserves the play’s bare stage and its metatheatrical self-consciousness about the drama of everyday life in a small American town. In the third act, “Death and Eternity,” the heroine, Emily, has died giving birth. We attend her funeral. Then she returns, with the Stage Manager, to relive her twelfth birthday. Reunion with her mother and father, and the chance to reexperience daily pleasures (“food…co≠ee”), is...