TRYING TO FIND RUDD

by

Irving A. Greenfield

Nothing comes from nothing. There is a history to everything - - even how a story comes into being. This one began almost fifty years ago, but at the time I didn't know it. I didn't know it was a story. It was a question. What happened to William Rudd? He disappeared. Vanished.

I was twenty-two then. I am seventy now. In the years between, I became a writer. And "looking for a story" became a way of life.

Rudd's disappearance fascinated me. No. It was not an obsession. If it had been, I would not have been able to write anything else. But it was there. Surfacing out of the past like a restless spirit demanding to be heard. I listened but could hear nothing. Not quite nothing. A title - - SATURDAY MORNING AT ELEVEN. A beginning perhaps? But never the completed work until one Sunday, Father's Day, I heard Schubert's Adagio and Rondo in F Major for Piano Quartet.

#

Father's Day. A beautiful June afternoon. My wife, Alicia, and I attend a concert on the Barge. Her gift to me. The Barge is a barge that was converted into an intimate concert hall. It offers exquisite chamber music played against a panoramic view of Manhattan seen through a large glass window behind the small stage. The Barge, moored at the Fulton Ferry Landing, near the Brooklyn tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, rises and falls with the heaving movements of the water beneath it.

The pier adjacent to the Barge is a favorite place for wedding parties to have the particular day memorialized. Frozen in time. Kept in the confines of a wedding album with other photographs of the event.

Alicia and I linger outside and watch. There are many wedding parties coming and going in either white or black stretch limousines. Oriental. Hispanic. And some speaking languages I don’t recognize.

As I look at the brides and grooms, I think of my own wedding. On September second it will be fifty-three years. By today's standards, a long time to be married to the same person. I wonder how many of the couples I see will remain married for five years? The odds are against them. Fewer will remain married for ten years. Half will wind up divorced with probably one child pulled between the opposing vectors of their warring parents. My two sons wound up divorced. But only one had children.

These bleak thoughts cast a momentary pall over the splendid day and the laughter and loveliness of the wedding parties. Though at my age, I think it is impossible to see the beauty of young people and not wonder what the future holds for them.

Alicia says she's going to see about the tickets. She phoned the previous week to reserve our seats and now wants to be sure that we will have them for the concert.

While she's gone, I walk to the end of the pier. Almost directly across the East River is the South Street Sea Port. A restoration that has several turn of the century ships, including the full rigged ship, Peking.

My thoughts skip and jump in no discernable order from the play I'm writing to where Alicia and I will go to dinner. She's never been much of an eater, and I am on very limited diet because of a variety of gastrointestinal problems that recently cropped up.

Alicia comes alongside of me. She tells me that our seats are in the second row on the right. I nod approvingly and suggest we walk before going aboard.

We stroll across the streets. There's an Italian restaurant on the corner. We look at the menu. Even for lunch, it's pricy. For dinner, it would be more so.

We cross back toward the pier and decide to board the Barge. The violinist is playing or practicing a portion of one of the selections I can't identify. It's an all Schubert program. The first piece is the Adagio and Rondo in F Major for Piano Quartet. The second, consist of nine piano pieces, And the third, after the intermission, is the Trout Quintet. A wonderful program for this particular Sunday afternoon.

After I buy Alicia a glass of white wine, I spend a few minutes reading the program notes.

More people arrive. An attractive woman, possibly in her late fifties or early sixties, sits next to Alicia. I notice the woman is carrying The Poetry Magazine. Years and years ago a poem of mine was published in it. I still write poetry but not very often. Poetry for me is a spur of the moment thing. All of it is free verse. I simply don't know how to write metered and rhyming verse. Not that I'd really want to. Free verse, if I want to express myself in that form, is vehicle enough for me.

My thoughts drift to, SWEET CORN FOR LORETTA, the play I am working on. It's my first full length drama. I completed a very rough draft in long hand about a month ago. It will be sometime in August before I go back to it. Perhaps not until September. Then, I will transfer it to a computer disk and begin the long process of rewriting and editing. It's a project that's never far from my thoughts. Though I am thinking about it, something else seems to be hovering in the background. Something I try to bring into focus but can't. The result is a growing feeling of uneasiness. A restlessness that seems to coincide with the movement of the barge as it pulls away from the pier or bumps against it. As many time as I've attended concerts on the Barge, I don't remember it moving as much or as violently.

#

The small concert hall is full. And the cellist, Ronald Thomas, a performer I >ve seen and heard many times before, strikes his instrument with the bow several times to call attention to himself. The audience becomes quiet, and he explains the structure of the first piece. Each of the instruments has a solo part that is played to give the total effect of a concerto for that particular instrument. The explanation is interesting. But musicology is not my speciality. I enjoy the music because it speaks to me emotionally, and at times intellectually, in a language I understand. But this explanation triggers something else - - thoughts about William (Bill) Rudd. I'm in a concert hall listening to a brief lecture about musical structure when suddenly everything I ever knew about Rudd pours, gushes through my brain.

#

I was eighteen when I first met him. He was Alicia's piano teacher. One Saturday afternoon I arranged to meet her at his apartment after her lesson. He lived in a large white brick building on West Seventy-Second Street, somewhere between Broadway and the West Side Highway.

His apartment was on the ground floor at the far end of a dimly lit hallway. I could hear the sound of the piano before I reached the door. When I rang the bell, the music stopped.

Bill opened the door. He was tall and thin. He had a sharply chiseled face with high cheek bones. Thinning blond or light brown hair and blue eyes. For several moments, he stood motionless. Appraising me as I appraised him. Neither of us moved. Though only eighteen, I already had some experience with the world. First as a runaway. At fifteen I hitchhiked and road the rails to California by way of Montana, Idaho and Utah. Finally back to New York with a long stop over in New Orleans where, using someone else's papers, I first shipped out on a tanker bound for Venezuela. And after graduating from high school, a year at sea as an ordinary seaman. But now I was in my first semester at Brooklyn College, where I met Alicia. We had a Classical Civilization class together.

Bill's face suddenly bloomed into a smile. Mine must have too, and we shook hands. His hand was very large. It could probably span ten notes.

The room was very large. There were two concert grand pianos in it, a few chairs and a sofa. Alicia and I sat on the sofa. Bill brought out a bottle of white wine, cheese and crackers and placed them on a small coffee table in front of the sofa. He sat in a large leather-covered chair across from us. We talked for a while about some of the places I had been to. Afterwards when Alicia and I were walking toward Broadway, I commented about her being alone with him in the apartment.

She laughed and said she was safer with him than with me. I was the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.

#

The music surrounds me. Isolates me from the present. My first meeting with Bill is clear. But the rest is not at all clear. What I mean, is that I never knew what happened to him.

 Alicia continued to take piano lessons. He even gave her voice lessons. She had a small but pleasant sounding voice. Now and then, I'd meet her at his apartment. Once Bill introduced me to Kevin, his companion. A younger and slighter version of himself and more ethereal. I seldom saw him after our initial meeting.

The next year Alicia and I became engaged. We planned to marry on September second of nineteen-fifty. Our long engagement was strewn with rocks, potholes and assorted obstacles I no longer remember.

Alicia graduated from Brooklyn College in June of that year and I graduated in August. But the war in Korea broke out, and the reserve unit I joined in nineteen forty-eight to avoid being drafted, was one of the first called to active duty. We were married, and six days later I was on my way to Fort Bliss, Texas.

Bill, though invited, did not attend our wedding.

For the next twenty-four months the army owned me. When I finally came home, I was not the same person I had been two years earlier. No one ever is the same after being in combat.

I don't remember exactly when, but sometime after I came home, I asked Alicia about Bill. She'd mentioned him in some of her letters to me. But I hardly knew him.

She shook her head and said he was gone. Disappeared without a trace.

I didn't pursue the subject. Knowing Bill's whereabouts wasn't high on my priority list. I had to put my life back together. Find a job. Return to a "normal" life.

But sometime in the fall of fifty-two, about four months after I was discharged, I was close to Seventy-Second street, and curiosity drove me to Bill's door. I heard the sound of a piano before I reached it. When I rang the bell, it stopped. The door opened. But not all the way. I found myself looking at Kevin. 

He recognized me.

"Go away," he said, and started to close the door.

I turned mean. Grabbed hold of his wrist and pulled him out into the hallway. Thirteen months in combat had put something in me that wasn't there before. "I'll break your fucking arm if you move," I said.

I don't remember his answer, but I do remember it was a whimper.

“What happened to Bill?" I asked.

            "I don't know."

I twisted his arm a bit more.

"So help me God, I don't know."

I let go of him and pushed him against the half-opened door.

"Ask Alicia. She knows," he said.

I was caught off guard. Before I could speak, Kevin was back in the apartment. The door slammed shut and locked. I don't remember whether or not I banged on the door and kicked it a few times, or whether I turned around and left the building.

By the time I returned home, I found Alicia in tears. Her paternal grandmother - - a woman in her late eighties - - died. I gave Alicia as much comfort as I could. But as I recall, it wasn't much. I recently returned from a place where I saw too many young men - - boys, many of them - - die. A few were my friends.

Whatever questions I wanted to ask Alicia about Billy, somehow got lost in the frenetic struggle of trying to make our marriage work. Two years had changed each of us. We had to get to know one another all over again. She was an elementary school teacher, and I was trying to earn a living. Immediately after I got out of the army, I worked for the Edward's Employment Agency. Alicia wanted me to become a teacher. I wanted to write. Eventually, I did both. I'm still doing both.

 #

The piano begins its solo. I recognize it in a way I never before had. Why? Had Bill played it? Now, I remember having gone to a recital in which he played.

While I listen intently to the music, I glance at Alicia. Her concentration is exponentially more intense than my own. For a seventy-year-old woman, she's still very attractive. She has aged gracefully, as the saying goes. Of course, she doesn't think so. Too many wrinkles. Loose skin. Veins showing. But aging, like a careful craftsman, cuts, twists and bends us to his liking. Sometimes with dignity, even majesty. Sometimes, hideously. Bending and twisting until we are unrecognizable even to ourselves.

The woman I look at becomes through the magic of memory the young woman I married. So startlingly beautiful that men and women turned to look at her in the street or when we entered a restaurant. She was not only physically beautiful, but she also possessed a kind of exoticism that men responded to and women envied. Because she was mine - - the sense of possession was very real then. Part of being a man. -  - I didn't give much thought to the affect she had on other men. And she was, for the most part, unaware of it. Unaware of herself physically. She wore little or no make-up, and she didn't worry about the clothes she wore. If she had a vanity, it was an odd one. She was very much aware of the tan she got during the summer. A day spent in the sun gave her a color - - a glow - - that frequently lead strangers to that she was a woman of color.

All of these thoughts passed through my mind in an instant, and the very next moment I knew what happened to Bill. Kevin's words should have given me the clue fifty years ago. But they hadn’t. Now they did. I always had the ending. Now, I have the complete story.

Bill fell in love with her and she with him. Or perhaps it was only she with him. Either way, it was an impossible situation. He knew what he was. She was an aberration in his life. He couldn’t risk destroying her, himself and his music. Perhaps they were lovers? Perhaps?

#

The music comes to an end. Applause fills the small concert hall.

Alicia turns to me and says, "That was exquisite."

I agree.

She looks at me, frowns, and asks, "Are you all right?"

"I know what happened to Bill Rudd," I say.

For several moments, she says nothing. But the expression on her face and the light in her eyes are silent spokesmen of recognition. Almost as if she were waiting all these years for me to discover what she and Bill knew. Then she asks, "Does it matter to you?"

"Not after fifty-three years," I answer.

She takes hold of my hand and brings it gently to her lips.

The Barge heaves up on the water, then like a great sigh of relief it slides into the next trough. . . .