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Namesake

Today I was remembering the antique queen Vernon Bach, Professor of Literature at a boy’s college in a small Midwestern town, who always accoutremented himself with a blue smoking jacket, his long cigarette holder held in an inverted hand.

Every other semester Vernon taught the Bloomsbury Group. One day he located a letter written by Virginia Woolf at a Dayton antique dealer’s and paid his whole semester’s teacher’s salary right there on it. He spoke German fluently and had Marlene Dietrich’s autograph prominently placed by his grand piano in the heavily curtained apartment often frequented by young aesthetes.

I loved him hear Stefan Georg, Thomas Mann and Rilke in the inimitable style of a middle-aged, late nineteenth century gentleman. Vernon often wore velvet lapels and preferred Isherwood’s young lumpen proletarians, easy going guys with few Puritan traits.

Every spring break he took his students to Europe and visited small antiquarian bookstores and flea markets. With a youthful enthusiasm, Vernon would locate the most unusual and precious objets d’art.

I was a seventeen-year-old freshman in 1968 when I met him. We were in Dresden and looking at an old music store that had managed to survive the war. Suddenly I looked up at him after I found a certain piece of sheet music.

“This is your namesake.”

“What?”

“Bach.”

“Stop it,” he whispered, “this may be the find of a lifetime. Let me see.”

Vernon’s pince-nez nearly fell of his pale face.

“This is priceless, young man. It’s eighteenth century. I know everything by Bach and this is a lost composition!”

He became choked up, started to cough madly, and I had to bring him a chair.

“Do you realize your find, young man?”

I thought naively it may be a copy and here I was in Germany after the war as traumatized as he, for different reasons, and presenting him this gift.

Vernon spoke to me in a very hush-hush voice, in High German, and then decided the group had to leave precipitously back to Ohio.

He had the sheet music appraised, and asked my advice on what to do with it.

“But you’re the expert, Doctor.”

It seemed that Vernon would never bee the same. He played the composition for me at his home, then hired a choir to perform it for us, first privately, then at a college assembly. I wondered if he had taken a national treasure, but I had my own issues with Germany about confiscation and compensation, and at that point couldn’t care less.

That last semester went wonderfully. I enjoyed the Bloomsbury course, and we had wonderful talks and parties at the Professor’s.

One rainy weekday night I got calls from both the Music and English Departments that Professor Bach had left a note of resignation and disappeared from sight.

So with him went the composition. A year later at the reading of his will in Teaneck, New Jersey I received a check which paid for my college tuition for my Master’s. I thought that was the end of the story, until a week later the Bach composition turned up in my mailbox. I decided to be a mensch and return it to the little shop in Dresden. But ten days after I mailed it, it mysteriously came back to me. Also a note in German from Vernon, saying, “Keep this to yourself.”

Now I knew he was alive. A month later a Deutsche Gramophone recording came express to my door.

Then the key to his spacious apartment came to me. I am living here, keeping the place up, throwing parties for friends, and awaiting any news about Bach. But that was his last note.

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