Recap—the Zanas had come out and brought food. The talk turned to mystical matters—how Bess always associates her mother with deer, and how, in speaking with her sister about this, she went to the window, to pull up the shades. “Wouldn’t it be weird,” said Bess, “if there were a deer…”
Don’t have to tell you. There wasn’t one.
There were fourteen.
And that’s when, in the Acres, the smoke alarm went off. And of course, there was no smoke in the house.
I took the damn thing outside, where there was a strong breeze.
Wouldn’t stop….
I finally took the battery out. And apparently unwilling to violate too many natural laws, Franny relented. Then the Morning Glories held their affair, to which they graciously invited us! Well, no Newhouse cannot NOT have the last word.
In this case, it was 17 minutes of Beethoven, the Heiliger Dankgesang. It, like Winterreise six months previously, had been haunting me.
Well, that put an end to THAT party. Not much you can do after that. So I took a walk with Cheryl, our hosts cleaned up Franny’s house, and they departed. “Wow,” said Eric, “wonder what an outsider would have thought of that.”
And then, an outsider turned the porch light off.
Wondering why I bothered, I went out to examine the empty porch.
(For a fuller account of the whole affair, as well as a wonderful performance of the Dankgesang, click here….)
Well, well—I knew about the dead hand (or thought I did), but the dead finger? Because this morning, the Schumann I had decided on for the daily trot wasn’t to Franny’s liking.
She changed it to the Brahms’ Piano Concerto number two.
Well, it was either the stupid shuffle button or the dead finger. But here’s the deal.
She wants Brahms? She gets Brahms.
And it was curiously appropriate. Because the second pregnancy began with another Brahms’ piano concerto. The first, of course—there are only two.
The first pregnancy ended with her death, which spawned a book. The second pregnancy ended with my death, and set off the writer. And now, in the curiously jumbled way things happen, Franny is born again, for the ten or ten thousand people who may read about her.
She’s out there stirring around—no more jangling for her!
I wrote, some paragraphs up (can’t be back…), that I knew about the dead hand. Seems I didn’t—thefreedictionary.com defines it thus:
dead hand
n.
1. The ever-present, oppressive influence of past events: "Psychotherapy explores the ways in which the past has shaped people, and how its dead hand continues to deform their lives" (James S. Gordon).
2. Mortmain
[Middle English dede hond, translation of Old French mortemain or Medieval Latin manus mortua, mortmain.]
Well, I knew the first definition, but what’s the skinny on the “mortmain?”
mortmain [ˈmɔːtˌmeɪn]
n
(Law) Law the state or condition of lands, buildings, etc., held inalienably, as by an ecclesiastical or other corporation
[from Old French mortemain, from Medieval Latin mortua manus dead hand, inalienable ownership]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003
mortmain
transfer or ownership of real property in perpetuity, as transfer to or ownership by a corporate body like a school, college, or church.
See also: Property and Ownership
This makes dim sense to me. Looked it up, further, and got an interesting account of the struggle in medieval times of property between the Church and State.
But I was hot and sweaty, exhausted as much by the trot as the labor of two pregnancies. Plus the Brahms was washing through my brain, still. I decided to skip any further investigation of the dead hand, or mortmain.
I’ll take the dead finger instead….
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