Anastasia Glas

by Lawrence Ballard

 

"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime..."

To His Coy Mistress,
Andrew Marvell

Martin Brecker taught whatever aspect of late medieval Italy he was reading, thinking and writing about at the moment. What the course happened to be called was beside the point, though it was called "Medieval Italy". I was drawn to medieval history, and Brecker, because both was so unlike anything I had been exposed to.

That year, Brecker's consuming interest was how Dante through Beatrice, Patriarch through Laura, and Boccacio through the ladies of the Decameron, had transformed the medieval courtly love of the lady and her knight into something more bourgeois and urban, though still sacred.

His point -- their point -- was that women were the fountain from which civilization, art and virtue flowed. Without the power of feminine civility, men would remain simple and brutal.

"Medieval Italy" could be taken for both undergraduate and (with an extra paper) graduate credit.

I first heard and saw Anastasia Glas in Brecker's class. It was her voice, bright, clipped, refined and almost bird-like. She was slim and elfin, a combination of Peter Pan and the girl-woman who was the reigning movie princess of the day, Audrey Hepburn. Anastasia had large dark eyes, a wide smile, and when she wore her dark hair pulled back, her ears stuck out.

At first she seemed shy. She seldom said anything in class, but when she did her diction gave her away.

She was clearly not from Cleveland, Ohio, or any place in Ohio. Her first language was Italian. She had mastered French at the private girl's school where her mother had taught music. Her accent was vaguely but not exactly British, as if she had learned English from an English tutor which, in fact, was the case.

To win her attention I devised a marvelously elegant scheme, different from my usual approach, which was to share my suitably worn copy of the Penguin edition of the Metaphysical Poets.

Brecker gave us a choice: we could either take a final essay exam (something in his tone indicated this was not the preferred alternative) or to do a research paper.

He had lectured on the importance of the works of a little known twelfth-century Cistercian monk, one Joachim of Fiorie, who Dante in the Paradiso had said was "endowed with the prophetic spirit." Joachim was a leading spokesman for the widespread late medieval feeling that the world as we know it was about to end, that the millennium was at hand.

Joachim offered a grand account for the three periods of human history: the Age of the Father, corresponding to the Old Testament, the Age of the Son, running from the birth of Christ through the present, and the Age of the Holy Spirit: the era that was just about to dawn any day now in which radiant peace and saintliness would transform the earth, and divinity could be experienced immediately and directly.

Joachim's vision of the post-Christian world just around the corner was taken up by a group of Spiritual Franciscans; soon declared heretics by the Pope, as they felt there would be no need for the established church once the Holy Spirit had set up shop.

This certainly did not match up with the Catholicism as taught at Saint Rita's, my grade school in Solon, Ohio.

Still, these Spiritual Franciscans had produced a collection of heretical poetry in Italian, partly inspired by courtly love and partly by the Joachim's vision of the lovely world that was just around the corner. And -- here is the important part -- the poetry had yet to be translated from Italian into English.

So I approached Anastasia in the hall after class with the proposition that we, to meet the research paper requirement, do a translation and commentary of some of these poems; she doing the translating and me doing the commenting. This seemed to me better than saying, "How about a beer after the big game?"

She accepted. The project never materialized but a date did. That, of course, was the point. We went to viola di gamba and harpsichord recital of baroque music held in a carriage house of a Shaker Heights estate. Anastasia wore the simple black velvet dress she wore when she ushered at the Cleveland Symphony.

Anastasia only vaguely recalled her father, a Milanese architect of apparently some note, who had only been briefly married to her mother Jacqueline, a professional pianist. Anastasia had been born in Italy during World War II. Among her earliest memories-- a lifetime mortification, a stain on her strikingly good manners-- was that as a small, very hungry child in post war northern Italy, she was seen by a passerby licking the last bit of the only fresh egg she had tasted in a month off the plate.

This experience led to her quietly held, but unwavering, conviction that good manners were a matter of both public and private concern.

I was never clear on the exact sequence of events that brought Anastasia and her mother to the United States after the war.

I was told that her uncle was a successful industrialist who lived some or all of the time in Woodstock, New York. He had a tall, good-looking mistress in New York City; an arrangement that Anastasia maintained did not seem to disturb her aunt. The uncle may have had something to do with Anastasia and her mother coming to the United States from Italy.

During Anastasia's high school years, her mother had been a music teacher at Foxcroft, the sort of thing that cultured European émigrés did after the war. Her life circumstances, along with a certain style she had acquired from her mother, gave Anastasia a lovely cosmopolitan patina.

Both she and her mother were, in fact, without any material resources beyond her mother's small teaching salary and what she picked up by giving private lessons.

After Foxcroft, Jacqueline got a job at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and then came to the Cleveland Institute of Music where Anastasia started to study concert piano. But Anastasia felt that she would never be good enough to have a concert career, and so enrolled at Western Reserve, where I met her in Brecker's medieval course.

Anastasia and her mother lived in a small, wooden, Victorian house. It reminded me of a larger version of a child's play house. It was once the gardener's house on the grounds of a large estate, the main house having been long since razed, in an enclave of grand old homes tucked into Cleveland's lakefront not far from downtown.

While nothing of the estate buildings remained except the gardener's house, there was an old apple orchard where Anastasia and I climbed trees. She proudly claimed to have prehensile toes and said her nose was too long. Her breasts were small and her bottom was superb, lightly muscled and each check nicely rounded.

In front of her small wooden house in the deep cold of a winter evening with frost forming inside the windows of my two-tone 1956 aquamarine-and-white Buick, I remember us kissing and groping neither knowingly nor well .

One time we went camping on the islands in Beausoliel Island, north of Toronto on Georgian Bay. The heat of the summer day warmed the crevasses in the granite boulders and the juniper berries gave off the smell of gin that mixed with the clean cold smell northern water.

But our great adventure was a Sunday afternoon on Lake Erie.

Anastasia had been given a little Styrofoam sail boat, really just a Styrofoam plank with an aluminum mast and plastic sail.

I had no experience whatsoever with sail boats and Anastasia even less. This simple lack of knowledge and experience was not about to inhibit me from impressing this svelte, exotic little Italian beauty with my nautical prowess. So we set sail into Lake Erie from a beach not far from the gardener's cottage on what was still a bright Sunday afternoon.

We launched into a gentle roll, protected by a massive stone break wall about twenty yards out from the beach.

It didn't seem to be very long at all before the gentle roll became more pronounced.

The swells quickly became dark waves against a dark sky and with one quick swat from the lake we were both hanging onto an upside down Styrofoam sailboat.

I shouted over the waves, "Let's get to the break-wall!"

We did, and as the waves lifted and crashed against the stones, I helped Anastasia get up onto the break wall.

I yelled above the roar, "You stay there and I'll try to get to shore."

The terror of the moment was framed by the prospect of heroism, a picture of us on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer with my comforting arm around Anastasia, chastely wrapped in a blanket provide by our Coast Guard rescuers.

But by now the sail had fallen off and I was desperately trying to hand-paddle what looked like a K-mart surf board toward the beach. No matter how hard I tried I was thrown back with the crush of each succeeding wave.

We were in trouble and I knew it. The storm worsened, and I was completely up-ended and tossed into the water.

I could feel the desperate rush of death -- just before my feet hit the sandy bottom. I was standing in three feet of water.

I walked back to the break wall in the churning water, took Anastasia's hand, and we laughed at death as we headed toward the beach dragging the Styrofoam boat behind us. Our only worry, the e coli count in Lake Erie.

Later at parties held in Murray Hill apartments with Klee or Kadinsky reproductions on all white walls, where we drank Almaden Mountain Chablis, I met Anastasia's friends.

They were students from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she had started before concluding that she would never be a first rate pianist. With one or two exceptions, what was striking about the young classical musicians was how poorly they were educated.

They knew little beyond music and the world of music. They were like tennis or ballet prodigies who had spent nearly every hour of every day since they were five getting good at just one thing. Mostly, they were talented but boring.

One exception was a short, stocky, curly-haired guy named Jerry. He could have been Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof." He was a brilliant graduate student in physics and at the same time a first row violinist with the Cleveland Symphony. He knew everything, and had opinions about even more. He was caught in the dilemma of whether he should make his mark as a Nobel Prize laureate or as concert soloist.

He was often in the company of another member of the classical music groupies that I remember vividly, though I have long since forgotten his name. Call him Matteo. Matteo was tall, fair skinned, with dark eyes and thick black hair -- movie star handsome.

At a party in an all-white apartment to which Anastasia and I had come together, Matteo decided to monopolize Anastasia's time and attention. With her willing compliance. I left the party alone. The following fall I had moved on to the graduate history program at the University of Rochester with Brecker.

Over a rainy Thanksgiving holiday weekend, when the campus was largely deserted and the dining hall closed, Anastasia stopped there on her way to a family reunion in Woodstock. That was the last time I saw her. Or was it the following summer, when she had moved from the gardener's cottage to somewhere else? I don't remember.

I did a computer search for the name "Anastasia Glas" in the online Western Reserve Alumni Directory recently. Each entry provides lines for the alumnus' current address, email address, profession, employer, marital status, number of children, and advanced degrees. There's even a space for a brief note.

For Anastasia Glas, all that appears is BA, 1965. A trace, nothing more.

 

The End