The Proof

The proof was the moment of truth and the moment of betrayal, the point at which the plate surrendered its secret and the engraver discovered whether the work she had done in the reversed, wax-coated darkness of the copper corresponded to the music she had been trying to reproduce, or whether somewhere in the long chain of translation — from manuscript to magnifying glass to graver to copper to ink to press to paper — something had been lost or distorted or misread, a wrong pitch, a wrong rhythm, a wrong dynamic, any one of the thousand small errors that could infiltrate the process and that would, on the proof, be made mercilessly visible.

Abigail carried the plate downstairs to the printing room at nine o'clock on a Friday morning, two weeks after the manuscript had arrived. She had completed the first sixteen pages of the full score — the entire first movement minus the coda — and she wanted to see them printed before she proceeded, because the proof was not only a check on accuracy but a check on proportion, on the visual balance of the page, on the way the notation occupied the space and the way the eye would move across it, and these things could not be fully judged from the plate itself, which was reversed and dark and showed only the bright lines of the engraving against the wax ground, without the spatial clarity that the printed page would provide.

Marcus Bell was already at the press. He was seventy-one, a tall man with the stooped posture of someone who had spent decades bending over a flatbed press, and his hands were permanently stained with ink — a deep blue-black that had worked its way into the creases of his palms and the beds of his fingernails and that no amount of washing could remove, so that his hands looked like geological formations, the ink deposited in layers over years, a visible record of every plate he had printed and every proof he had pulled since he began working at Hartwell & Loewe in 1982.

Marcus did not speak much. He communicated through the press — through the precise adjustments of pressure and ink and dampness that determined the quality of the printed result, adjustments that were, in their way, as skilled and as consequential as the engraving itself, because a perfectly engraved plate could produce a terrible print if the ink was too thick or too thin, if the paper was too dry or too wet, if the pressure was too heavy or too light, and the difference between too much and too little was measured not in visible increments but in the feel of the paper under the roller, the resistance of the ink on the plate, the sound of the press as it moved through its cycle — a low, rhythmic groaning that Marcus had been listening to for forty-three years and that he could read the way a mechanic reads an engine, hearing in its variations the adjustments he needed to make.

Abigail placed the first plate on the bed of the press. Marcus examined it, tilting it under the overhead light to check the depth and consistency of the engraved lines, running his fingertips across the surface in a gesture that was as diagnostic as a doctor's palpation — he was feeling for rough spots, for incomplete cuts, for areas where the wax ground had not been fully removed from the engraved grooves, any of which would affect the print quality. He nodded. He inked the plate.

The inking was done with a leather dauber — a pad of tightly rolled sheepskin mounted on a wooden handle — which Marcus loaded with ink from a ceramic pot and applied to the plate in firm, circular motions, working the ink into the engraved grooves and then wiping the excess from the surface with a series of cloths, each one finer than the last, until the surface was clean and only the grooves held ink. This was the principle of intaglio printing: the image was below the surface, held in the grooves cut by the engraver, and the ink was transferred to the paper not by pressing down on the raised surface, as in relief printing, but by pressing the paper into the grooves, so that the paper's fibers picked up the ink from the recesses of the plate.

The paper was Rives BFK, a French mould-made sheet that Hartwell & Loewe had used since 1947, when Joseph Loewe had discovered it at a paper merchant's warehouse on Arch Street and had immediately recognized its suitability for music printing — its weight heavy enough to resist cockling under the pressure of the press, its surface smooth enough to receive fine detail, its color a warm off-white that reduced glare under the stage lighting of a concert hall or the desk lamp of a study. The paper had been dampened the night before, each sheet sandwiched between damp blotters in a wooden press, a process that softened the fibers and allowed them to conform more closely to the engraved plate, picking up even the finest lines — the thin strokes of a pianissimo dynamic marking, the delicate curves of a grace-note slur — with a fidelity that dry paper could not achieve.

Marcus placed a dampened sheet on the plate. He cranked the press bed under the roller. The roller descended — a heavy steel cylinder, its surface polished to a mirror finish — and passed over the plate with the slow, even pressure that Marcus had calibrated by feel, the groan of the press rising and falling as the roller moved from one end of the plate to the other, and then the bed emerged on the other side and Marcus lifted the paper from the plate in a single smooth motion, peeling it upward from one edge, and held it up to the light.

The first page of Peter Barlow's Violin Concerto No. 2 appeared on the paper in all its detail — the thirteen staves, the clefs, the key signature, the time signature, the first measure of silence with its whole rests hanging below the fourth line of each staff, and then the second measure, the cellos and basses tremolando, the bassoons sustaining their B-flat, and above everything the solo violin entering on the third beat with its A-natural followed by the leap to B-flat on the second ledger line, the note that exceeded the staff, the note that reached beyond.

Abigail took the proof from Marcus and carried it upstairs to her bench. She turned on the lamp and positioned the magnifying glass and began the methodical examination that every proof required — starting at the top left corner of the page and moving across and down, staff by staff, measure by measure, note by note, checking each element against the manuscript, comparing what she had cut with what Barlow had written, looking for the discrepancies that experience had taught her to expect because no engraver, no matter how skilled or how careful, produced a completely error-free plate on the first attempt.

She found two errors in the first page. A missing staccato dot on the second oboe part in measure six — the dot had been in the manuscript but Abigail had overlooked it, possibly because it was obscured by a coffee stain on the manuscript page — and a stem that was two millimeters too long in the first violin part in measure twelve, a cosmetic rather than a musical error but one that she would correct because the house style manual specified stem lengths to the half-millimeter and because Abigail did not distinguish between cosmetic errors and musical errors, all errors being equally intolerable.

She marked the errors on the proof with a red pencil — a small circle around each one, with a brief notation in the margin indicating the correction to be made — and set the proof aside. She would make the corrections on the plate later. For now, she continued examining the remaining pages.

The second page was clean. The third page had one error — a natural sign that should have been a flat, a potentially serious mistake that would have changed the pitch of a note in the horn part and that Abigail marked with a double circle to indicate its importance. The fourth page had no errors. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth were clean. The ninth had a spacing issue — two notes in the viola part were too close together, making the passage harder to read than it needed to be — and Abigail marked this as well, though she knew the correction would be difficult, because adjusting the spacing of one note affected the spacing of all the notes around it, a cascade of small repositionings that might require burnishing and re-cutting an entire measure.

She worked through all sixteen pages. She found, in total, seven errors and three cosmetic issues. This was, for a first proof of a complex full score, an excellent result — George Parrish, who was the fastest engraver but not always the most meticulous, typically had twelve to fifteen errors per first proof, and David Koss, who was meticulous but slow, typically had five to eight. Abigail's average was six. Seven was slightly above her average, and she attributed the extra error to the difficulty of the manuscript, to the hours she had spent with the magnifying glass trying to decipher Barlow's deteriorating handwriting, the constant small judgments about whether a note was on a line or in a space, whether a stem pointed up or down, whether an accidental was a sharp or a natural.

She set the marked proofs on the cork strip above her bench, where they would wait until she had time to make the corrections. Then she gathered the remaining proofs — the ones that were clean, that needed no corrections — and held them in a stack and looked at them.

The music looked right.

This was not a technical judgment. She had already made the technical judgments, note by note, and the seven errors she had found were marked and would be corrected. This was something else — a visual impression, a gestalt, the sense that the printed pages, taken as a whole, possessed the quality that she had learned to recognize in well-engraved music, a quality that had no name in the house style manual but that she thought of as rightness, the feeling that the notation was not merely accurate but inevitable, that each note was in its only possible position on the page, that the spacing and the layout and the proportions had achieved the particular balance that made the eye want to move forward through the music, to follow the notation from measure to measure and page to page the way the ear wanted to follow the sound from phrase to phrase and movement to movement.

She had felt this before, with other scores. It was rare. Most of the music she engraved looked correct — which was the minimum standard — and some of it looked good, which was the standard she aimed for, but only a few pieces, in thirty-one years of engraving, had looked right, had possessed this quality of inevitability, and she had noticed that the quality did not correlate with the difficulty of the music or the fame of the composer but with something more elusive, something in the music itself that either did or did not lend itself to visual representation, that either did or did not translate from the invisible medium of sound to the visible medium of the printed page.

Peter Barlow's concerto translated.

She did not know why. She did not analyze it. She held the proofs and looked at them and felt the rightness and set them down and picked up her graver and went back to work, because the rightness was not her achievement — it was the music's quality, Barlow's quality, the quality of a composer whose notation was, she understood now, as carefully considered as his orchestration, each notehead placed on the manuscript page with an awareness of how it would look as well as how it would sound, the visual and the auditory dimensions of the music composed simultaneously, in parallel, so that the engraver's task was not to impose order on disorder but to transmit an order that already existed.

This was what distinguished the great composers' manuscripts from the merely competent ones. This was what Friedrich Hartwell had meant when he told Joseph Loewe, and Joseph Loewe had told Abigail, that the best manuscripts engraved themselves — that the engraver's hand, when working from a well-composed manuscript, felt guided rather than laboring, the decisions about spacing and layout and proportion suggesting themselves naturally from the music's own structure.

The Barlow manuscript, despite its physical deterioration, had this quality. The notes, where they were legible, were placed with an intelligence that Abigail could feel in her hands as she cut them, a sense of the music knowing where it wanted to be on the page, and her job being not to decide but to listen — to listen with her eyes and her hands to what the notation was telling her, and to follow it.

She thought about this as she worked through the afternoon, correcting the errors on the plates, burnishing and re-cutting the misplaced staccato dot, the wrong accidental, the overlong stem. The corrections were small. The work was painstaking. Each correction required her to remove the wax ground from the affected area, burnish out the error, re-polish the surface, re-apply the ground, and re-engrave the correct notation, a process that took, depending on the complexity of the error, between ten minutes and an hour, and that had to be done with even more care than the original engraving because the burnished area, no matter how carefully prepared, never quite matched the virgin surface of the plate, the copper having been compressed and reworked in a way that changed its texture at a microscopic level.

She finished the corrections at four-thirty. She pulled new proofs of the corrected pages and examined them and found them clean. She clipped the clean proofs to the job sheet and wrote on the sheet, in her careful hand: First movement, pages 1-16, proof approved. AV.

Her initials. The same initials as Eliot's — A.V. and E.V. — distinguished only by the first letter, the mother and son separated in the alphabet as they were separated in life, by a distance that was small in one sense and vast in another.

She put on her coat and picked up her bag and left the workshop. On the stairs she met Margaret Hartwell, who was coming up from the front office with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, and Margaret stopped and said, "How is the Barlow coming?"

"The first movement is nearly done. I've proofed sixteen pages."

"And the manuscript? Can you read it?"

"Most of it. The first movement is fairly clear. The second and third will be harder."

Margaret nodded. She was a practical woman, a business woman, the inheritor of her grandfather's firm but not of his craft — she could not engrave, could not read music beyond the most basic level, but she understood the economics of the enterprise and the quality of its product, and she managed both with a competence that Abigail respected. "The estate is paying well," Margaret said. "They want the best work. Barlow apparently specified in his will that the concerto should be engraved by hand, by us. He knew your work."

"He told me once that it was beautiful."

She had not meant to say this. It came out the way some notes come out of an instrument — unexpectedly, without preparation, the fingers finding a position the mind had not intended, and the sound emerging before it could be recalled. Margaret looked at her with an expression that was, Abigail thought, surprised, not because the compliment was surprising but because Abigail had volunteered it, had offered a personal detail in a conversation that could have remained entirely professional.

"Well," Margaret said. "It is."

They parted on the stairs. Abigail went to her car and drove home and sat at the kitchen table with the manuscript and her notebook and continued the work of deciphering, and she did not think about what she had said to Margaret or about what Margaret had said in return, because these were words, and words were not what mattered, not in the workshop and not in the manuscript and not in the space between herself and Eliot — what mattered was the work, the marks on the page, the cuts in the copper, the proof that emerged when the plate was inked and the paper was pressed and the roller passed over it with its slow, heavy, inexorable pressure, and the music appeared, reversed and corrected, on the white surface of the page.

She opened the manuscript to the second movement. The handwriting was worse here, as she had noted before — the notes larger, the lines less steady, the annotations more frequent and more difficult to read. She began at the beginning, with the Andante con moto marking and the solo violin's recitative-like opening, and she worked her way forward, note by note, using the magnifying glass and the pencil and the notebook, copying the annotations as she found them, building a catalog of Barlow's messages to Eliot.

On page five of the second movement she found something new. Not an annotation but a correction — a passage of six measures that had been crossed out with a single diagonal line and rewritten on a separate page that had been inserted into the manuscript, the insert page bearing a note in Barlow's hand: Replace mm. 47-52 with this. The original was too kind. E would hear the kindness and reject it.

Abigail read this note several times. Too kind. E would hear the kindness and reject it. She looked at the original passage — the one that had been crossed out — and then at the replacement, and she could see the difference. The original was consonant, warm, the solo violin playing a melody in thirds over a string accompaniment that was rich and supportive, the kind of writing that wrapped the soloist in the orchestra's embrace. The replacement was different. The melody was the same — the same notes, the same rhythm — but the accompaniment had been changed. The strings were now playing in a higher register, thinner, more exposed, and the harmony had been altered so that the intervals between the solo violin and the accompaniment were wider, the sound more open, more vulnerable, less comforting.

Barlow had removed the comfort. He had heard something in Eliot — in Eliot's aesthetic, in Eliot's character, in the way Eliot listened and judged — that would not accept comfort, that would hear kindness in the music and reject it as false, and he had rewritten the passage to meet that standard, to offer not comfort but truth, not an embrace but an open hand.

Abigail sat with this for a long time. She sat at the kitchen table in the house in Mount Airy and she thought about what it meant for one person to know another person well enough to anticipate their rejection, to understand not only what they would accept but what they would refuse, and to adjust accordingly — not to give them what they wanted but to give them what they could bear, which was a different thing entirely, and which required a depth of knowledge that went beyond friendship, beyond mentorship, into the territory that Abigail associated with the closest and most difficult relationships of her own life.

She had this knowledge of Eliot. She had always had it, from the time he was an infant and she had learned to read his cries — hunger, fatigue, discomfort, the particular sharp cry that meant he was overstimulated and needed the lights dimmed and the sounds reduced — through his childhood and his adolescence and into his adulthood, where the cries had been replaced by silences but the reading was the same, the constant calibration of what he could bear and what he could not.

But Peter Barlow had had this knowledge too. Not the mother's knowledge, not the knowledge of the body and the history and the daily accumulation of small observations, but the musician's knowledge, the knowledge of the ear and the mind, the knowledge of what Eliot heard when he listened to music and what he expected and what he would reject, and this knowledge, embedded in the manuscript, was evidence of a relationship that Abigail had not known existed and that she was now encountering for the first time, in the form of crossings-out and corrections and penciled annotations in the margin.

She envied Peter Barlow. She recognized the envy for what it was — irrational, inappropriate, directed at a dead man who had done nothing to earn it beyond knowing her son in a way she could not — and she set it aside, the way she set aside all emotions that interfered with the work, and she continued reading the manuscript, and the evening passed, and the pages turned, and the music accumulated in her notebook, and the catalog of annotations grew, and the house was quiet, and outside the window the March night settled over Mount Airy with the patient indifference of all nights in all seasons, and Abigail worked, and the proof of what she was learning lay on the table around her, spread out like a map of a country she was only beginning to enter.