The Heartbreak of Jacqueline du Pré
For the Fourth of July party coming up at the club, everyone was supposed to wear something red, white, and blue. Nothing I had with me went with the dress code.
“I’m taking you shopping,” Regina said. I might have been wrong, but I got the feeling she needed to distract herself.
In all the time I’d been living with the Emersons that summer—a month now—this was the first time I’d seen Regina take the steering wheel of their Jeep Wagoneer.
She drove slowly, with both hands on the wheel, and stared straight ahead, sitting up perfectly straight, her back not touching the seat.
She checked the rearview mirror regularly.
We didn’t go to a mall, or the outlet stores along the highway. She brought me to a place that looked as if it had been in business since before my parents were born. They had a display in the window of women’s suits that looked like the kind of thing Nancy Reagan would wear, only cheaper.
“We’re looking for a party dress,” Regina told the salesperson. “Patriotic theme.” The woman took out a dress with cap sleeves, royal blue, with white piping around the neck.
“Our young friend could wear this with a simple red cardigan,” the saleslady said, addressing Regina. “Or red accessories. A flag pin, maybe.”
Regina accompanied me to the dressing room.
Not anticipating this, I’d worn my undershirt, not the training bra, which I’d washed that morning in the sink of my upstairs bathroom so Prudence wouldn’t see it in the family laundry.
My jeans already on the floor, I pulled my shirt over my head, leaving me in my cotton undershirt and underpants.
Regina studied my body the way a visitor at an art museum might consider an abstract painting she didn’t understand or care for.
“You haven’t hit puberty, I see.” Regina sat on a stool in the dressing room, assessing my body. No visible breast development still, and I was holding my stomach in.
“You don’t need to do that,” she said. Regina missed nothing. “You’re going to have a nice body. Just wait. I know it seems uncomfortable now, but things are going to get better for you.”
Did they get better for you? I wanted to ask her. I probably knew the answer.
I studied my reflection. The dress the salesperson had selected for me was not the kind I’d pick out for myself, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to make Regina happy. I also knew, as her husband did, that this was impossible.
The blue dress was a little long. They would have hemmed it for me at the store, but there was no way this dress would ever look fashionable, so why bother?
In the car on the way home, Regina put on a cassette tape.
I knew nothing about classical music, having been raised to a nonstop background of my father’s jazz—which I drowned out, when I could, with Cyndi Lauper or the Bangles on the radio, or my one precious Madonna tape.
Regina’s voice, as she explained what we were listening to, contained an unusual element of emotion.
“This is a cello concerto by a composer named Elgar. It’s the saddest piece of music I’ve ever heard,” she said.
We drove without speaking for a while. I got the impression that if she loosened up on the steering wheel even a little, she might crash the car into a tree.
“You’re listening to Jacqueline du Pré,” she said. “In my opinion, she’s the finest cellist who ever lived. She married a great pianist and conductor.”
The way Regina said this, I knew she was telling me something important. Important to Regina, anyway.
“Did you ever hear her at a concert?” I asked. My mother took me to see Joan Baez in Boston, the one time ever I can remember doing something like that with her, though this had less to do with my mother wanting me to see Joan Baez than it did with her wanting to be there, herself.
“Jacqueline du Pré stopped performing a long time ago,” Regina said. “She got a disease called multiple sclerosis, where she couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. She was just in her twenties.”
“What happened to her?”
“She can’t play the cello anymore. Her husband’s off somewhere, leading an orchestra. He’s probably got a girlfriend.”
Regina stopped talking and rewound the tape a little.
“You have to hear this part,” she said. “It’s like she’s making the cello sigh.
Then it starts moaning. Then . . . wait for this .
. . here it comes . . . the only word I know for the sound the cello makes here is keening.
You might not know what that means, but listen to this part and you will.
“Then it gets quieter again, but that’s the saddest of all. The first time I heard this, it made me cry.”
I couldn’t imagine that, Regina crying.
At the point Jacqueline recorded the Elgar concerto for cello, Regina told me, she didn’t know yet that she had multiple sclerosis, or that her husband would leave after she got so sick.
“But it’s all in the music,” Regina said.
“It’s like she knew. She understood a broken heart even before she had one. ”
Regina went silent then. From the tape deck, the Elgar concerto filled the car with the nearly unbearably sad strains of Jacqueline du Pré’s cello. A person didn’t have to know about classical music to understand.
“You’d probably prefer rock and roll or something,” Regina said. “Happy music. I get it. But sometimes it’s important to experience things you don’t think you’ll enjoy. You may discover new parts of yourself you didn’t know existed.”
The music was growing on me. It wasn’t my usual kind of thing, but when Regina offered to stop the tape, I said I wanted to hear the rest.
“It’s not such a terrible thing when a piece of music is sad,” Regina said. “Life is sad too.” For a moment, she was silent. Just driving. “You have no idea,” she told me.
In the seat beside her, I fingered the fabric of the blue dress.
When Regina had handed over the money for the dress, I had thought, briefly, of all the clothes I’d rather own than this particular item, which wasn’t cheap.
I had felt a small sting of regret at the time.
Now, hearing the story of the great cellist losing the ability to play, none of that seemed to matter.
“There are worse things than feeling sad,” Regina said. “Feeling nothing. That’s worse.”
It was hard to know what she meant. My problem was, I felt everything.