Chapter 3

CARYN

From: Caryn McFadden

To: Prof. Cynthia Ward

Columbia University

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Music History Subcommittee

New York City

April 7

Virginia City, Nevada

I received notification of the subcommittee’s rejection of my application to change my dissertation and your letter insisting that I must finish up with Havron before starting what you call my wild goose chase. Well, Prof. Ward, I reject your rejection!

You and I have worked together for five years, and you know that I am not given to wild goose chases or flights of fancy.

Yet, I also realize the impossibility of explaining to you what has happened.

Completing the work on Havron would not be right because it is not true. Yes, I know what evidence says. I have compiled the evidence. But it is not true.

My original thesis concerned the frontier as a motif in the compositions of Stuart Havron (1827-1875) whose work, more frequently celebrated by American symphony orchestras, has proved to be the single most important discovery in American music in the last three years. We are reclaiming Havron as one of our early masters.

Adam Couper's extraordinary study and biography, STUART HAVRON, FRONTIER COMPOSER IN PARIS, was the first, and so far the only attempt to codify Havron’s life and works. I considered this work woefully inadequate, although I would not dispute Couper’s conclusion, that Havron’s tonal and rhythmic explorations foreshadowed Copland, Bernstein, Torke, and Wuorinin, combined with one of the greatest melodic talents since Tchaikovsky.

Except it is not true. Havron did not write the most significant compositions attributed to him. So I cannot continue my old work.

Couper briefly discussed Havron’s mistress, Elisabeth Barclay. He portrayed her as a beautiful, passionate, and headstrong woman for whom Havron suffered a fatalistic weakness. Couper called her “a tempestuous woman and a colorful pianist!” He deigns to tell us that she lived in the western United States around the mid-1860s, but he is only interested in sex and scandal in Paris. He does not seem interested in her as a person or as a musician. His attitude toward her annoyed me. After all, Havron was obsessed with her.

Then, in San Francisco, I came across her by accident. I went back in the archives farther in time than I needed to go just to get a peek at those old concerts with mixed bills figuring out where to put the piano, demonstrating the birth of our recital form. It was idle curiosity, the end of my day. The colorful Jules Louvain is interesting; he presents whole concerti and symphonies, not only individual movements as was the fashion then. And in those programs, I came across her name - Elisabeth Barclay. Over and over again. Not only did she perform as a soloist in San Francisco, but she also composed. She seems to have been immensely popular.

I headed for the newspapers.

Critics praised her vigorous, romantic style, swooned at her delicate touch, and raved about her beauty. Elisabeth Barclay in 1867 did not wear Clara Schumann black. She bared her shoulders in magnificent gowns and plunged into a celebration of music’s beauty and truth, atypically performing whole programs on her own. She seems to have had incredible stamina and a tantalizing vision she was able to express musically.

Once I knew to look for her, I found her everywhere, touring up and down the California Coast and in mining towns, playing Chopin, Beethoven, Hummel, Clementi, Liszt, Haydn, Mozart, and her own works. She did not read scores but played from memory, improvised at any suggestion for hours, and loved to dance at balls after concerts before heading out the next day on a grueling stagecoach journey. Journalists delighted in her beauty and talent but, alas, they had reservations about her composing. They urged her to remain true to her calling, a “Muse”. One critic wrote, “Woman cannot be inspired to create, she was created to inspire man.” (George “Ballet is Woman” Balanchine must have subscribed to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.)

And yet Couper says, if begrudgingly, “Elisabeth’s talent must have been competent. Nevertheless, the frontier was so hungry for feminine beauty, she could have performed ‘Three Blind Mice’ and they would still have loved her.”

So much for that – no matter that other historians have proved the frontier audiences to be quite sophisticated. Certainly, the programs indicate that. Couper ignores in-your-face evidence to say what he wants and calls it objective history. And all of us believe it!!!

I left San Francisco with all my notes on Elisabeth Barclay and not much on Havron.

Not helpful for my dissertation!

Thanksgiving dinner in New York. My friend Kate Sherman is an associate professor of Women’s History at NYU. I mentioned Barclay’s name. She had heard it but couldn’t remember why. We spent some time looking through her library. She showed me an old bound volume of letters and writings by a New York abolitionist and newspaper editor, Mary Videau (1824-1886) who had spent several years in Nevada and California. We found an excerpt of a speech delivered in 1867 by one Elisabeth Barclay in Carson City, Nevada.

My Elisabeth Barclay? Mary Videau wrote that this Barclay raised a great deal of money for charity on the strength of her talent. There was some mention of a prominent family. Certainly she was well educated and felt strongly in favor of women’s rights.

Barclay’s speech scandalized that audience of women, and Videau writes about the speech in an essay concerning women raised to fear power.

There is only a mere fragment of what Barclay said: “Think that God made women just the way we find ourselves. Think that this is what pleases God – all our thoughts, our desires, our wishes, our mental, spiritual, and physical abilities and potentials – we are to use them because they are gifts from God. Every good thing we picture ourselves as able and willing to do, every talent that pushes us to work, God pictures us doing. God wills us to work! There are no needs for extensive tracts or silly logic to explain why God made woman. The answer to that question lies not in men’s complicated essays, but is as simple as the wish in each of our hearts.”

Perhaps not so radical now, but in an age of corsets and repression, when educating women was seen as “educating the cows,” these words could seem daring and frightening.

Mary Videau wrote, “It was like the quiet triumph of Easter in my heart to see this young woman stand and say such wonderful words.”

I went back to San Francisco and the Berkeley archives. No luck after a week.

However, Easter only seems to be an empty tomb.

I took a train over the Sierras and a bus to Carson City. At the library there, I mentioned the name, “Elisabeth Barclay.” The librarians seemed to think they knew her name but could not remember why. I utilized their new computer database and searched through hundreds and hundreds of titles and subjects. None of them indexed, referenced, or cross referenced to Elisabeth Barclay. I looked through women’s history, music, politics, and lists of Carson City families. I couldn’t even find Mary Videau.

Frustrated, I hit a casino, and beneath a portrait of Mark Twain, I won $200.

I ended up in the museum wandering aimlessly around the halls, reading each little note card in an exhibit of prehistoric Nevada and about the arrival of native peoples, the Washo and Paiute tribes. I was about to leave when I decided to go back and buy a book from the gift shop up on the second floor. I hurried through the silly model “ghost town” with the grizzly old prospector. I hurried through a room when my contact lens caught a draft, burning my eye, and forcing me to stop. I leaned over a glass case to catch the lens and reinsert it. Turning, I focused my eyes on a few plaques on the wall. I blinked rapidly through tears, and I read, not two feet away from me, the name, “Mary Videau.”

It was the Women’s Wall.

Eight prominent women in Nevada history. Each had a frame.

Only eight?

I read Mary Videau’s plaque: She had been born in New York State, had come West as a seamstress, had made money in mining stocks, opened a school, and then founded a women’s newspaper. She was, the plaque said, a reminder that the women’s rights movement had taken hold in the early days.

I rushed into the gift shop.

“What do you have about Mary Videau?” I asked.

“Who?” asked the elderly, knitting lady sitting by the cash register.

“She has a plaque out there,” I said.

“I don’t know the name,” said the volunteer, slowly.

But she got up and followed my finger pointing at a plaque about the Paiute tribeswoman, Sarah Winnemucca.

“No, that’s not her!” I cried.

“Now there is a wonderful woman,” said the volunteer. “She worked hard for her people. Let me show you some biographies.”

“I am sure they are interesting, but I want to know about Mary Videau.”

“I never heard of her. You are mistaken.”

Mary Videau’s plaque was gone. Had I dreamed it? “I am sorry,” I said.

She looked annoyed, so I bought a book about Sarah Winnemucca and a book on the Carson Valley history that had wonderful historical pictures. Not expecting much, I skimmed through the Winnemucca book, but when my eye dropped down a page, a name leaped out at me from a footnote.

I read the note. Elisabeth Barclay was half Washo Indian.

My Elisabeth Barclay?

I rushed back to the library. It was closed.

I went back to the motel, took a bath, and settled down to read the Carson Valley book.

In one paragraph about a ranch, the author mentioned that Laura Dayton, who married Seth A. Barclay, had formerly owned this ranch. Good! A man’s name! I could look him up!

The next morning, I couldn’t find that paragraph.

I was crazy. I was destroying my career, my doctorate – living in dreams. I wandered Carson City, through casinos and bookstores. I woke up in the middle of the night in my motel room, turned on the TV, and shrieked.

Barclay! That was the family name of the ranchers on that TV series, Silver Sierra, the western show set in this part of the country – Virginia City, Lake Tahoe, Carson City.

I felt distinctly weird.

Yet I did have these notes on Elisabeth. That had been the name of Havron’s mistress. But there had not been an Elisabeth on Silver Sierra. None of the regular characters had been female. Closed shop. And I knew that the series had started as an idea in a producer’s head. It hadn’t been based on history.

Or could the idea in the producer’s head somehow be linked to something that had actually happened? Or was it all a coincidence, a part of my losing my mind?

I drove up to northeast Lake Tahoe where they have a reconstructed Barclay Ranch, and I stood at a point overlooking the lake, an aqua jewel among pines and snow capped mountains.

I felt pure terror. For a moment.

I took the one o’clock tour of the house and stood in the living room where everything seemed strange and unreal, a ludicrous fiction discussed as truth that we believed to be true.

I ran out and up the mountain above the house to get away from people. Looking down at the house, I realized it was only a fake prop, but there was truth to it, somewhere.

I sat on a rock in the midst of a clearing, near a mound of stones. On the ground fluttered scraps of yellowed and torn paper. I picked up a scrap. A handwritten signature–

Elisabeth Barclay.

I laughed. You are really losing it now, McFadden.

The wind picked up, starting to carry the paper scraps. I grabbed a few and looked down. They were letters. A handwritten signature–

Adam Barclay?

Adam Barclay was the TV family’s father.

In my fear, I let go of the papers, the only real connection, so to speak, between the Elisabeth Barclay of my research and the TV Barclays.

I could not bear the feelings that suddenly came over me: Loss of something I had never had, that had never been, pouring through me, and terrible grief at the loss. I had no idea what I mourned. Lost dreams? Lost loves? The need to adapt to a world spiritually and emotionally foreign to me in order to live?

I walked slowly through the crass, stupid park that had nothing to do with anything, and yet it housed the memories of an incredibly precious something I knew deep within but which I could put no name to.

As I left the park, I sensed an anger rising in me. I hated these people paying tribute to a fake world and a manipulative history that glorified violence. The gift shop, for heaven’s sake, sold toy guns and icons of Jesus side by side! And those desperate scraps of paper I had lost were my only clue that this was real and not my imagination.

I bawled over my steering wheel.

At the motel, I looked at my Stuart Havron papers. They meant nothing to me anymore. For five years, I’d worked on his music, perhaps a little in love, perhaps wondering if I could have kept him alive, and now I didn’t care. I identified with Elisabeth, whose history, like my life, was in pieces and buried by lies other people felt were more important.

All right. I would try again. I gathered myself up and went to the Carson City newspaper office where I placed an ad, a big one.

“Music Historian Seeks Information on Elisabeth Barclay, 19th Century Pianist and Composer. C. McFadden, Ormsby House, Carson City.”

Two days later, a woman called. She sounded ancient. Her name was Elmira Grover, and she invited me to tea the next day at her house in Virginia City.

“Is Elisabeth real? Did she live?” I burst out, after telling her my story.

She only said, “I have been waiting for you.”

The next day I drove over the Ophir Grade and up Gold Canyon to Virginia City.

Virginia City is terribly lovely. It rises up from the desert, a Victorian gingerbread town of bright colors against a mammoth desert of deep purple and gold. I thought and still do that the genuine Virginia City is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

It is a sad little tourist town now, but in the 1860s and 1870s, it was the liveliest boom town west of the Mississippi with a surprising amount of cultural sophistication. It was not a cow town and does not remotely resemble the Virginia City depicted in movies and television. Or on Silver Sierra. And oh, strange reality! The Virginia City merchants created stores to imitate “cow palaces” that never actually existed. They do this to cater to a public that believes the West was all made up of cow towns with shootemups at the OK corral every night.

Here, on the edge of the desert in the 1850s, miners dug for gold and cursed an annoying “blue stuff” that clogged their rockers and made the gold impure. For years, they tossed this “blue stuff” away without even wondering what it was, but in 1859, this “blue stuff” was assayed as the richest silver find in all history, the great Comstock Lode.

Well, Professor, in Virginia City, I found my own “blue stuff.” Elmira Grover lives in a bright yellow house on “B” Street on top of the mountain. She is a widow, in her mid-sixties.

“Come on in, I thought you’d never get here.”

She was skinny and the gray hair hanging halfway down her back was soft and silky. She wore a typical business suit, a colorful red skirt and jacket with a white blouse.

“You caught me just in from work,” she said. “I just came in from the bank.”

I held back.

She grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me into the house.

Elmira Grover apparently loved potpourri.

A young black girl stared at me.

“Betsy, this is the historian. Bring the tea out now.” She said to me, “Betsy helps me, but she’s been waiting for you, too. I told her the time would happen. But Sarah said, no, it didn’t before. But –” and Elmira pounded a table emphatically, “People don’t always get prophecy right. Look at Abraham. He got it all wrong.”

She pulled me into a parlor filled with light and mirrors, and also on the wall, a large portrait of a stunningly beautiful woman with golden hair in a blue gown.

“That is Mary Videau,” said Elmira. “Sit. This is Sarah.”

Sarah was a very pregnant teenager, also appearing to be an American Indian. She was sitting at a computer.

“She monitors all the Silver Sierra sites on the Web,” said Elmira, and the old lady winked at me. “When she’s not at her job, she’s on the computer, and now that she’s on maternity leave –”

“Stop that!” Sarah cried out.

I sat down in a large, dumpy, comfortable old chair.

“What did you mean, you were waiting for me?” I asked.

“You asked the question,” said Elmira. “You are a musician and historian. You deal in evidence and reality. You asked the question. This is right. Sarah will be giving birth soon. The time we have waited for is upon us.”

I put down the cup of tea. “Mrs. Grover, what are you talking about?”

“It is all right.” Elmira laughed and sat down. “We should go slowly. Sarah and I belong to a particular sect of the Washo tribe, and she is my granddaughter. I am fourth in a line of healing women descended from Timpanagos, whom you know as Elisabeth Barclay, Sarah’s mother was fifth, and Sarah is sixth.”

I stared at her. “What?”

“It is the seventh who has the power, enormous healing power –”

I gripped the arms of my chair, ready to spring to escape, but fascinated that Elmira Grover discussed Elisabeth as a real person.

“Elisabeth Barclay was a child of power,” said Elmira.

“She is real –,” I said.

“Yes, now, for you, too,” said Elmira. “Tell me how you know her.”

So I told her my story. “As soon as I see, or I know about her, it’s gone, as though she never lived.”

Elmira nodded, her smile growing.

“If people do not want to see her, they will create a world where they will not have to.”

“I want to see her,” I said.

She produced an old yellow sheet of paper, protected in plastic, that was a page of a composition for piano. The melody was mostly delicate with a light left hand, yet the melody carried both power and great beauty.

“I know this,” I said.

“Yes,” said Elmira softly.

“No,” I said. “I know this. I think it is a theme from Stuart Havron’s fourth piano concerto.”

“Is that what you hear?” she asked.

No, it wasn’t. I had been trying to relate the little melody to what I knew and searched for the familiar out of habit and perhaps need. Historians seek comfort like anyone else.

“No,” I said, turning to her.

Her face relaxed, and light streamed from her eyes, yet I could see tears, too.

“Good,” she said. She took the music and put it in a box on top of the piano.

“It is Elisabeth’s,” she said.

“What?” I asked. “How do you know?”

Betsy laughed. “She knows! She knows!”

Elmira said, “That you have come is so very important. It means that our wait is almost over, and that the vision our ancestors had was real. Come with me.”

“What? What?”

“Come on,” said Betsy, following us as we went up the narrow winding staircase. Sarah laughed and clapped her hands, reacting to a chat room. “First this music historian, and now, someone has the pilot episode before the official pilot! With a character named Elisabeth played by Lianna Dru!”

My heart pounded. I half expected to meet Elisabeth herself up there, draped in veils like Miss Havisham. Instead, Elmira opened the door to an empty room. Or so it seemed. She flicked the light switch.

The walls were covered in cabinets –from floor to ceiling –all locked and bolted. In the very center of the room, extension cords trailing over the bare wood floor, a card table and a folding chair stood ready, equipped with a light, notebooks, pens, and a laptop computer and disk holder.

“See? All set up,” said Elmira.

“Set up for what?” I asked.

Elmira took a key from the desk and handed it to Betsy.

“Unbind her,” she said with a note of triumph in her voice, “and let her go.”

Betsy crossed the room, unlocked a cupboard door, and opened it. Files and leather bound books tumbled out. Sheets of music. Scores of music. I picked up a journal.

“What do the Washo have to do with me now? How can I be one of them? I am civilized, I do not –”

I flipped back to the opening sheet. There, in faded ink, the graceful signature,

Elisabeth Marie Barclay

I stood, music sheets in my hands. Betsy kept opening cabinets and cupboards, all filled with old bound journals, notebooks, boxes of compositions, receipts, and programs. From floor to ceiling, here were four walls filled with carefully organized and preserved papers, the great majority of them by Elisabeth Barclay.

“They have come down to me,” said Elmira, simply. “I spent many years putting them in order.”

I turned on her, furiously. “Why do you hide them like this?”

She shook her head sadly. “I am not hiding them. No one ever asked to see them.”

“What?” I seethed.

She reached out to me. “We need you.”

Something crackled. I saw the intercom.

“What is it, Sarah?” Elmira called.

“There’s someone down here at the door. She says she is Elisabeth Barclay.”

“Yes!” called Betsy, raising her fist in triumph.

“Round one,” said Elmira as Betsy hurried out.

“You see,” said Elmira, “some are beginning to remember.” She put her arms on mine and looked at me with such love – I have never seen such love before. “You see, we so need you. The prophecy will soon happen, and the world will soon change. Elisabeth and Masete are together. But we need you. You must understand her truth. Her music was the key to the prophecy. Once she began composing, she was her mother’s daughter.”

So, my dear Cynthia, that is why I am living here in Virginia City, studying this material at the top of a ghost town where the zephyrs blow at night, and the loneliness after the tourist buses leave is deep and real. As I stand on the balcony of this house, behind me, birch trees catch the wind and send it down the canyon, hundreds of miles away, through the desert and, to the west, the lake and the mountains. I look past the casinos and hot dog parlors, the fudge parlors, and the wild west museums to a land that had belonged to a people for more than ten thousand years.

It is hard to imagine that. It is then we must remember why we are here.

More women have come with a connection to Elisabeth Barclay, and Elmira expects that others will be arriving. I will stay as long as I can. I must work fast. I am afraid the manuscripts, the house, these women, Elmira, the whole world will disappear, and I will never have known Elisabeth Barclay or known she was real. But that is a silly fear.

She has always been real in spite of the fiction we created that said she never lived.

*********************************************************************

Who Have the Power

364 pages

Bookshelf Press/WingSpan imprint

$19.95

ISBN 1-59594-039-1

For information: contact marysharbor-oceana@yahoo.com

copyright 2006 Mary Sheeran. All rights reserved.

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