Ken Burns Presents Willa Cather’s America

What? You don't know Willa Cather? The amazing 20th century writer known for subtly nuanced characters and an intimate understanding of place? All right then, let's get you caught up. In the next hour, join me, Meg Wolitzer, and one of Cather's biggest fans, documentarian Ken Burns, as we explore Willa Cather's America. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. When you picture early American life, maybe you imagine the salty sea dogs and rough-and-tumble port towns of Herman Melville, or the unforgiving wilds and rugged adventurers of James Fenimore Cooper, or the schoolhouses and steamships populated by Mark Twain's playful rogues. Sure, all that stuff is in my head, too. But I've got other things up there as well. The vast western prairies of Nebraska and the determined, passionate artists of New York. Yes, I'm talking about Willa Cather, the underappreciated 20th century writer behind titles including My Antonia and O Pioneers. While she may not hold the sway of various white guys in early American literature, or even someone like Louisa May Alcott, Cather was a powerful writer with a clear-eyed sense of the world around her. But all the writers I know love Willa Cather. My friend Mary Gordon says she loves her because Cather is not afraid of impossible situations to which there are no solutions. And, Mary adds, she's a tragedian, but unlike many American writers, there's no melodrama in it. When I first read Cather, the rhythms of the Great Plains were a far, windswept cry from my own suburban existence. But it wasn't only the landscape that I loved. The inner landscape is also Cather's strength. So why am I telling you this now? Well, for one, literature lovers recently celebrated Cather's sesquicentennial, that is, her 150th anniversary. And two, we at Selected Shorts found out that another great American artist, the documentarian Ken Burns, loves Cather. I mean, really loves her. Not only did he tell a reporter that he considered Cather one of the greats alongside those early American male writers I mentioned earlier, but he named one of his daughters Willa. I mean, I love coffee, but I didn't name my kid Robusta. These two distinct happenings added up to one excellent reason to celebrate Willa Cather's work, and we did so over the course of an evening at Symphony Space with Ken Burns as our guest host. In this show, we're going to hear some of Cather's America with some commentary from Burns along the way. Here he is speaking from the stage. I've long admired Willa Cather's sense of place. She made permanent in words a landscape that has largely disappeared from the United States. But her ability to capture the emotions she experienced in life are universal, allowing us to appreciate with gratitude that moment in time and those moments that, in her writing, transcend time. Thankfully, the vibrant characters, the poetic language, and the deaf storytelling that make Gathers so great are present in all of her short fiction, too. So let's get started. That was Ken Burns introducing an evening of Willa Cather stories at Symphony Space. Our first Cather piece is one of her earliest, titled The Way of the World. It's a play on the strangely grown-up aspects of childhood, and it was read by the actor, producer, and author Sonia Manzano. She's best known as Maria on Sesame Street, a role she played for 44 years, but she also created the animated series Alma's Way and published a novel, Coming Up Cuban. And now reading Willa Cather's Way of the World, here's Sonia Manzano. The Way of the World. speckled burnham sat on mary eliza's front porch waiting until she finished her practicing apparently he was not in a hurry for her to do so he shuffled his bare feet uneasily over the splintery boards when the dragging hopeless thumping within quickened in tempo to a rapid hurried volley of sounds telling that Mary Eliza's hour was nearly over and that she was prodding the lagging moments with fiery impatience. Indeed, cares of state were weighing heavily upon Speckle, and he had some excuse for gravity, for Speckle was a prince in his own right and a ruler of men. In Speckle Burnham's backyard were half a dozen store boxes of large dimensions placed evenly in a row against the side of the barn, and there was Speckle's empire. Speckle had offered his yard as a possible site for a flourishing town, and the other boys brought their store boxes and called the town Speckleville in honor of the founder. Now, it must not be thought that Speckleville was a transient town Such as boys often found in the morning and destroyed in the evening Speckle's special point was organization No boy was allowed to change his business or his place of business Without due permission from the assembled council of Speckleville Jimmy Templeton kept the grocery stocked with cinnamon bars, soda crackers, ginger snaps, and Texas mix A species of cheap candy which came in big wooden buckets These he pilfered from his father's store Tommy Sanders was proprietor of a hardware store stocked with bows and arrows, slingshots, peashooters, and ammunition for the same Shorty Thompson kept a pool room with a table covered with one of his mother's comforters Dick Hutchinson ran the dime museum where he fearlessly handled live bull snakes for the sum of a few pins and exhibited snapping turtles, pocket gophers, bullets from Chattanooga, rusty firearms and a piece of the rope with which a horse thief had been lynched. Reinhold Berkner was the son of the village undertaker and was a youth of dollarous turn of mind and insisted upon keeping a marble shop where he made little tombstones and neat caskets for the boys, deceased woodpeckers, and prairie dogs. Speckle, by reason of inventive genius and real estate monopoly held all the important offices in the town He was mayor and postmaster and he conducted a bank wherein he compelled the citizens to deposit their pins charging them heavily for that privilege and lending out their own funds to them at a ruinous usury His father was a chattel broker in the days when money changed hands quickly in the country beyond the Missouri, and from his tenderest years, speckle had been initiated into the nefarious arts of the business. But although his threats many a time caused poor delinquents to tremble, I never heard of him actually foreclosing on anyone. and I can assert on good authority that when Dick Hutchinson's father failed in business, causing great consternation throughout the village, Speckle went to Dick privately and offered to lend him a few hundred pins gratis to tide him over any present difficulties. But certainly, Speckle had a right to be autocratic, for it was Speckles' fecund fancy more than his backyard that was the real site of that town, and his imagination was the coin current of the realm and made those store boxes seem temples of trade to more eyes than his own. A really creative imagination was Speckles, one that could invent occupations for half a dozen boys, metamorphize an express wagon into a streetcar line, a rubber hose into city waterworks, devise feast days and circuses and public rejoicings, railway accidents and universal disasters, even invent a 4th of July in the middle of June and cause the hearts of his fellow townsmen to beat high with patriotism. for Speckle, by a species of innocent hypnotism, colored the mental visions of his fellow townsmen until his fancies seemed weighty realities to them. Just as a clever play actor makes you tremble and catch your breath when he draws his harmless rapier. And like the play actor, Speckle was the willing victim of his own conceit. What matter if he had to peddle milk to the neighbor women at night? Tomorrow, he was the founder of a city and a king of men. So, the inhabitants of Speckleville had dwelt together in all peace and concord until Mary Eliza Jenkins had peered at them through the morning glory vines on her back porch and had envied these six male beings, their happiness. For although Mary Eliza was the tomboy of the street, the instincts of her sex were strong in her. And that six male beings should dwell together in ease and happiness seemed to her an unnatural and monstrous thing. Furthermore, she and Speckle had played together ever since the days when he had been father to all of her dolls and had rocked them to sleep, and until the founding of Speckleville, he had openly preferred her to any boy on the street, and she bitterly resented his desertion. Once in a moment of rashness, the boys invited her over to a circus in Speckle's barn, and after that, Speckle knew no peace of his life. Night and day, Mary Eliza importuned him for admittance to his town. She hung around his back porch as soon as she was through practicing in the morning. She waylaid him while he was taking his cow out to pasture and sprang upon him from ambush when he was taking his milk in the evening, even offering to accompany him and carry one of the pails. Now, Speckle himself had no real objection of granting Mary Eliza naturalization papers and full rights of citizenship. But the other boys would not hear of it. She'll try to boss us all just like she bosses you, objected Tommy Sanders. Anyhow, she's a girl, and this ain't a girl's play. I suppose she'd keep a dressmaking shop and dress our dolls for us, snorted Dick Hutchinson contemptuously. Put it any way you like. She'll spoil the town, said Jimmy Templeton. On this particular morning, Speckle had come over to, if possible, persuade Mary Eliza to desist from her appeals. And he sat in the sunshine gloomily awaiting the interview. Presently, a triumphant one, two, three, four, and a triumphant bang announced that her hour of penal servitude was over for the day, and she dashed out onto the porch. Well, have you made them, she demanded. Speckle braced himself and came directly to the point. I can't make them merry lives, and they say you'd get tired and spoil the town. Oh, stuff, what makes them say that? Well, it's because you're a girl, I guess, said Speckle reflectively. wrinkling the big yellow freckle on his nose that was accountable for his nickname. Girl, nothing. I play I was a man, and that's all you do. M.E. Jenkins, that's what I'll have over my store. I've got the signs already made. Delmonico Restaurant, M.E. Jenkins, proprietor. Come, speckle, you know I can skin a cat as well as you can, and I can beat Hutch running, can't I now? Of course you can. I'd like to have you in, Mary Liza, remonstrated speckle. Oh well, I don't care so much about getting in your old town anyway. Only my father keeps the bakery, and I could have cookies and cream puffs and candy to sell in my store chocolates and things. None of your old Texas mixed. Say, Mary Eliza, do you mean that? I guess I better tell them. I guess I'll tell them tonight, said Speckle with a new interest. Oh, do, Speckle, and do get me in, cried Mary Eliza as she hopped gleefully from one foot to the other. You know you can if you want to, because it's in your yard, and we can have strawberry for a ring horse when we have circuses His tail isn all rubbed off like your billies and he can be a pony in the sideshow too Speckle did not reply at once. He was wondering whether Mary Eliza could meet the large demands on the imagination requisite to citizenship in Speckleville. he was not wholly certain as to the enduring qualities of feminine imagination but he did not know exactly how to express his doubts so he remained silent what are you thinking about now demanded Mary Eliza oh nothing I'll see them about it tonight and if they don't let me in, I'll know it's all your fault, called Mary Eliza threateningly as she dashed into the house. That evening, after Speckle had taken his milk, he hung the empty pails on the fence and went around to interview each of the boys privately. He suspected that by seeing them separately, he could best appeal to their individual weaknesses. All right, if you fellas say so, Temp, replied gravely. I won't be the man to kick, but you mark my words, Speckle, she'll spoil the town. Girls always spoil everything a boy's got if you give them a chance. That night, after Speckle's mother had anointed his sunburned face with cold cream and he had climbed into bed, he heard a violent tic-tac on the window at the head of his bed. Hello, Temp, is that you? No, Speckle, it's me. Did you make them? Whispered Mary Eliza. Yes, I made them, replied Speckle rather wearily. Oh, Speckle, you are a dandy. I just love you, Speckle. And Mary Eliza pounded and scratched joyfully at the screen as she departed. The next day, Speckle vacated his piano box, the largest and most commodious structure in his town And fitted it up for Mary Eliza with a lavishness which astonished his comrades In the afternoon, Mary Eliza made her triumphant entry into Speckleville With an old-fashioned carpet sack in one hand and a Japanese umbrella in the other She was all smiles and sweetmeats and showed neither resentment nor embarrassment at her chilling reception. She set forth her cream puffs and chocolates, and in half an hour, the Delmonico restaurant was the center of interest and commercial activity. I shall not attempt to rehearse all the arts and wiles by which Mary Eliza deposed Speckle and made herself sole imperatrix of Speckleville. She made it her business to appeal to every masculine instinct in the boys, beginning with their stomachs. When first a woman tempted a man, she said unto him, Eat! The cream puffs alone would have assured her victory, but she did not stop there. She possessed cunning of hand and could make wonderful neckties of colored tissue paper and stiff hats of pasteboard covered with black paper and polished with white of egg, which she disposed of for a number of pins. She became the star of the circus ring, and it was considered a great sight to behold Mary Eliza attired in blue cambrick tights with an abundance of blonde locks made by unraveling a few feet of new heavy rope. Flowing about her shoulders, executing feats of marvelous dexterity upon the flying trapeze. indeed Mary Eliza possessed certain talents which peculiarly fitted her to dwell and rule in a boy's town otherwise she could never have brought disaster and ruin upon the town of Speckleville for all the boys will admit that there are some girls who would make the best boys in the world if they were not girls. It soon befell that Mary Eliza's word, her lightest wish was law in Speckleville. Half the letters that went through Speckle's post office were for her, and even the phlegmatic Reinhold Berkner made her a beautiful little tombstone with a rose carved on it as an ornament for her center table. Meanwhile, Speckle, poor deposed Speckle, sat by without demure and without more than an occasional pang of jealousy and watched the success of his protege, learning, as many another monarch had done before him, how pleasant it sometimes is to serve. now alas it is time to introduce the tragic motif in this simple chronicle of speckleville to bring about the advent of the heavy villain into the comedy he came in the form of a boy from chicago to spend the summer with his aunt just across the street from Speckles' home. From the first, he found small favor in the eyes of the Speckleville boys. To begin with, he invariably wore shoes and stockings, a habit disgustingly effeminate to any true and loyal Specklevillian. To this, he added the grievance of a stiff hat and on Sundays even sunk to the infamy of kid gloves. He also smoked many Cubib cigarettes. Corn silks were considered the only manly smoke in Speckleville and ate some odorous confection to conceal his guilt from his mama. The good citizens of Speckleville all looked with horror upon these gilded vices. All, save one, perhaps. The first time the new boy visited the town, he bought a cream puff off Mary Eliza, and on being told that the price of the same was ten pins, he laughed scornfully, saying that he did not carry a pincushion and had not brought his workbox with him. He then threw down a nickel upon the counter. Now, to offer money to a citizen of Speckleville was an insult. like offering a bribe. And the boys were painfully surprised when Mary Eliza accepted that shameful coin, bestowing upon the purchaser a smile more desirable than many cream puffs. After that, the new boy came off and usually confining his trade to the Delmonico restaurant where he hung about telling of his trip on Lake Michigan and his outings in Lincoln Park while the proprietor listened with greedy eyes. He persisted in paying for his purchases in coppers and nickels and Mary Eliza persisted in accepting the despised currency while the Speckleville boys went about with a secret shame in their hearts feeling that somehow she had disgraced herself and them. They began to wonder as to just what a girl's notion of the square thing was, a question that has sometimes vexed older heads. As for Mary Eliza, although she sometimes joined with the boys in a laugh at his expense, she by no means shared the general dislike of the new boy. She thought his city clothes and superior manners very impressive and felt more grown up and important when in his company. She had tact enough to know that this fine young gentleman would never wear tissue paper ties, so she made him a red paper rose, which he wore daily, perfuming it with Florida water. Speckle had noted the growing discontent in his town and he sought to conceal Mary Eliza's disgraceful conduct and shield her from open contempt by asking her to make him a paper rose but she laughed heartlessly with a wink at the new boy and said she had no more paper I doubt if any of the rebuffs his gallantry may have received in after years ever cut speckle as that wing did. Matters hastened from bad to worse in the town. The days came and went as days will. But over Mary Eliza's throne there was the shadow of the new boy. The crisis came at last when in the meeting of the city council, Mary Eliza boldly proposed admitting the new boy to the town. Her motion was greeted by indignant howls and hisses and speckled blush to the roots of his red hair. Very well, said Mary Eliza. If you won't have him in, then I won't be in either. Him and me will start a town over in his yard. You can just go and do it then. We won't have that Chicago dude hanging around here any longer, howled Councilman Sanders knocking over his chair. Mary Eliza arose with great dignity and began to pack her wares into her carpet bag. She made no display of ill humor and talked cheerfully of her new town as she wrapped up her candies in tissue paper. the boys stood by and watched her they did not believe she would go but Mary Eliza departed even as she had come with her carpet bag in one hand and her Japanese parasol tilted gaily over her head while Speckle held the gate open for her feeling that his illusions were vanishing fast I'll send over from my boss in the morning Speckle and you must all come over to our town and buy things and we'll come over and buy things at yours, she called after him. The treachery, the infamy of her deception never seemed to have occurred to her. She'll be back tomorrow all right enough, said Speckle. But on the morrow, the new boy came for the piano box and by noon Mary Eliza was fairly installed across the street, making paper neckties for the new boy and canvassing the neighborhood for the new boy's town. There could be no doubt that she had transferred her allegiance. The Speckleville boys went resolutely to their stores and bought and sold and made a great show, but they had little heart in it all. They missed the cream puffs and the paper ties, and they missed something else more than these, something they could not name. Speckle had a chance to confide in his young uncle, who was in the rapturous torches of his first love affair. He would have been told that it was the eternal feminine they missed, and he would have been as much in the dark as before. Mary Eliza had put herself at the head of everything, and now nothing went on without her. After the manner of her kind, she had come to where she was not wanted, made herself indispensable, and gone again, taking with her, oh, so much more than her parasol and chocolate creams. Everything went wrong in Speckleville that afternoon, and after the day was over, the citizens of that passing village were quarreling violently, not as in former times because everyone wanted to do something in a different way, but because no one wanted to do anything at all. It's all your fault, Speckle. We ought never to have her in, and we wouldn't have if it hadn't been for you. Well, now she's gone, protested Speckle, so why can't we go on like we did before? No one attempted to answer. It was scarcely a wise question to ask. I always told you she'd spoil the town, Speckle, and now she's done it, said Jimmy Templeton. Well, you fellows seemed mighty glad to get her after she came anyway, and you needn't put your lip in it, Temp. You loafed around her a store like a ninny, retorted Speckle, who felt that his persecution was more than he could bear. Jimmy was not in the mood to endure a jibe at his weakness, and by way of answer, he bit speckled wine on the side of the nose, and it required the united strength of their fellow citizens to part them. I'm not going to stay in your old town any longer. I can have more fun in my own yard, and I'm going to take my things home, announced Dick Hutchinson as he began pocketing the properties of his museum. I'll be darned if I do, cried Jimmy Templeton, and I thank you to give me my pins out of your old tin box Mr Speckle Speckle had woes enough without a run on his bank When Providence helps a man to trouble it usually generous and dishes out all manner of calamities, regardless of what he may already have on his plate. Speckle sat there until he had paid out the last pin from his spice box. The boys all fell to packing their belongings as though fleeing from a doomed city, and they ceased not from making unkind remarks as they did so. Under Speckle's very eyes, his town vanished, as many another western town has done since then. It's all your fault, Speckle, balled Jimmy Templeton as he vaulted over the back fence, and Speckle, after having said all the swear words he knew, went off to the barn to smoke innumerable corn silk cigarettes and to wonder at the queer way things are run down here. After he had taken his milk that night, he heard Mary Eliza laughing as she played tag with the new boy under the electric light, and he sat down with his empty pails in his deserted town. as Caius Marius once sat among the ruins of Carthage. That was Sonia Manzano reading Way of the World by Willa Cather. The title of this story is pretty telling. Speckle is a boy, but in Cather's own life, she and her brothers created their own imaginary town, of which she was elected mayor. There are spins in this story on sexism and gender roles, but one thing that I thought about reading it is that every writer is in fact the mayor of their own imaginary town, and the treasurer, dog catcher, and comptroller, whatever that is. Basically, the writer both sees and oversees an invented and fully populated world. That's what Willa Cather did again and again. When we return, a Cather story that encompasses art, farm life, and a once-in-a-lifetime reunion. I'm Meg Wallitzer. You're listening to Selected Shorts, recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide. Welcome back. This is Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. You've just heard some great short fiction. Now it's your turn. It's time for the 2026 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize We're very excited that this year's guest judge is one of shorts' favorite funny mainstays, Simon Rich The winning work will be performed by an actor in spring 2026 and published on Electric Literature The winning writer will receive $1,000 and a free 10-week course with Gotham Writers You have until March 6th to submit your story which you can do by going to SelectedShorts.org and scrolling to the bottom of the page. We can't wait to read your submissions. The next Cather piece we'll hear is titled A Wagner Matinee. Don't worry, we're not going to play an opera. Music is a central theme of many of Cather's stories. It displays a really interesting confluence of Cather's interests, artists and farmers, city and country, and the areas in which they overlap. Reading this piece is longtime shorts reader David Strathairn. He's a gifted actor whose impressive list of credits includes films such as Good Night and Good Luck, as well as recent hits, including Nomadland. And now, Strathairn reads A Wagner Matinee by Willa Cather. A Wagner Matinee. I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy blue-lined notepaper and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard. It informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died and that it had become necessary for her to come to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and render her whatever services might prove necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I found it no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether. The name of my aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure, at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of recollection so wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farmer boy my aunt had known, scourged with chillblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and raw from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively as though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organ, thumbing the scales with my stiff red hands while she beside me made canvas mittens for the huskers. The next morning I set out for the station. When the train arrived, I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and when I got her into the carriage, she looked not unlike one of those charred, smoked bodies that firemen lift from the debris of a burned building. She had come all the way in a day coach. Her linen duster had become black with soot, and her black bonnet gray with dust during the journey. When we arrived at my boarding house, the landlady put her to bed at once, and I did not see her again until the next morning. Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's misshapen figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory somewhere back in the latter 60s. One summer, which she had spent in the little village in the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those absurd and extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of 21 sometimes inspires in a plain, angular, spectacled woman of 30. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who of course had no money, took a homestead in Red Willow County, 50 miles from the railroad. There, they measured off their 80 acres by driving across the prairie in a wagon to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to the conditions of primitive savagery. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank. For 30 years, my aunt had not been farther than 50 miles from the homestead. But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of this and must have been considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the soiled linen duster, which on her arrival was the most conspicuous feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress whose ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly into the hands of a country dressmaker. my poor aunt's figure however would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker originally stooped her shoulders were now almost bent together over her sunken chest she wore ill-fitting false teeth and her skin was yellow as a mongolian's from constant exposure to pitiless wind and to the alkaline water, which transforms the most transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather. The most striking thing about her physiognomy, however, was the incessant twitching of the mouth and eyebrows, a form of nervous disorder resulting from isolation and monotony and from frequent physical suffering. In my boyhood, this affliction had possessed a sort of horrible fascination for me, of which I was secretly very much ashamed, for in those days I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way and had a reverential affection for her. During the three winters when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking three meals for half a dozen farmhands and putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing board, hearing me at the kitchen table beside her recite Latin declensions and conjugations and gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her at her ironing or mending that I read my first Shakespeare and her old textbook of mythology was the first that ever came into my hands. She taught me my scales and exercises too, on the little parlor organ which her husband had bought her after 15 years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument except an accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting, while I struggled with the harmonious blacksmith, but she seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman, and she had the consolation of religion. And to her, at least, her martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once, when I had been doggedly beating out some easy passages from an old score of Uranti that I had found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice be, it is not that. When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival, she was still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for hungrily for half a lifetime. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk together in the straw-thatched cow shed, and she, because I was more than usually tired or because her husband had spoken sharply to me, would tell me of the splendid performance of Meyerbeer's Huguenots she had seen in Paris in her youth. At two o'clock, the Boston Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I intended to take my aunt. though, as I conversed with her, I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake, I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the long struggle mercifully ended at last. She questioned me absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half milk to a weakling calf and had neglected to tell her daughter about the freshly opened kit of mackerel in the cellar that it would spoil if it were not used directly I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas and found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their respective situations and had once possessed the piano score of the Flying Dutchman. I began to think it would have been best to get her back to Red Willow County without waking her and regretted having suggested the concert. From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle less passive and inert and seemed to begin to perceive her surroundings. I had felt some trepidation, lest she might become aware of the absurdities of her attire or might experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into a world to which she had been dead for a quarter of a century. But again I found how superficially I had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost as stony as those with which the granite Ramesses in a museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal, separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have seen the same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard faces unshorn, as though they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon or in the yellow blaze of the Arizona desert. The audience was made up chiefly of women. one lost the contour of faces and figures indeed any effect of line whatever and there was only the color contrast of bodices past counting the shimmer and shading of fabric soft and firm silky and sheer resisting and yielding all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape with here and there the dead black shadow of a frock coat my aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of tube paint on a palette when the musicians came out and took their places she gave a little stir of anticipation and looked with quickening interest down over the rail at that invariable grouping perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from plowing forever and ever between green aisles of corn. I reminded myself of the impression made on me by the clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-shaded stand lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and the bass vials in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle-necks and bows. I recalled how, in the first orchestra I had ever heard, those long bow strokes seemed to draw the soul out of me as a conjurer's stick reels out paper ribbon from a hat. The first number was the Tannhauser Overture. When the violins drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's Chorus, my Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve. than it was that I first realized that for her this singing of basses and stinging frenzy of lighter strings broke a silence of thirty years, the inconceivable silence of the plains. With the battle between the two motifs, with the bitter frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and where we are so powerless to combat. I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress, the black pond where I had learned to swim. The world there is the flat world of the ancients. To the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak. To the west, a corral that stretched to sunset. between the sordid conquests of peace, more merciless than those of war. The overture closed. My aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of 30 years, through the films made little by little by each of the 365 days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and her musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and Meyerbeers, and I could remember hearing her sing years ago certain melodies of Verdi's. When I had fallen ill with a fever, she used to sit by my cot in the evening and sing, Home to our mountains, oh, let us return, in a way fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already. I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying vainly to conjecture what that warfare of motifs, that seething turmoil of strings and winds, might mean to her. Had this music any message for her? Wagner had been a sealed book to Americans before the 60s. Had she anything left with which to comprehend this glory that had flashed around the world since she had gone from it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility through the numbers from the flying Dutchman, though her fingers worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though of themselves they were recalling the piano score they had once played. poor old hands they were stretched and pulled and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead with the palms unduly swollen the fingers bent and knotted on one of them a thin worn band that once had been a wedding ring as I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands I remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days. Soon after, the tenor began the prize song. I heard a quick drawn breath and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her cheeks. And I think in a moment more, they were in my eyes as well. It never really dies, then, the soul. It withers to the outward eye only, like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century, and yet, if placed in water, grows green again. My aunt wept gently throughout the development and elaboration of the melody. During the intermission before the second half of the concert I questioned my aunt and found that the prize song was not new to her Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp cow puncher who had sung in the chorus at Beirut where he was a boy along with the other peasant boys and girls Of a Sunday morning, he used to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the Hans' bedroom, which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, and singing the prize song while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step, so far as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody. Shortly afterward, he had gone to town on the 4th of July, been drunk for several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collarbone. Well, we have come to better things than the old Travatore at any rate, Aunt Georgie, I queried with well-meant jocularity. Her lip quivered, and she hastily put a handkerchief up to her mouth. From behind it, she murmured, and you have been hearing this ever since you left me, Clark? Her question was the gentlest and saddest of reproaches. The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the ring. This was followed by the forest music from Siegfried, and the program closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but almost continuously. I was perplexed as to what measure of musical comprehension was left to her, to her who had heard nothing but the singing of gospel hymns in Methodist services at the square frame schoolhouse on section 13. I was unable to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soap suds or worked into bread or milked into the bottom of a pail. The deluge of sound poured on and on. I never knew what she found in the shining current of it. I never knew how far it bore her or past what happy islands or under what skies. From the trembling of her face, I could well believe that the Siegfried March, at least, carried her out where the myriad graves are, out into the gray burying grounds of the sea or into some world of death vaster yet where, from the beginning of the world, Hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream and renouncing slept. The concert was over. The people filed out of the hall, chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again. But my kinswoman made no effort to rise. I spoke gently to her. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. I don't want to go, Clark I don't want to go I understood For her, just outside the door of the concert hall lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs the tall, unpainted house naked as a tower with weather-curled boards The crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry. The gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was David Strathairn performing A Wagner Matinee by Willa Cather. It's so interesting that Cather chose to let us see Georgiana through her nephew's eyes, as he witnesses the way the concert breaks through her religious narrative and changes her. If these stories piqued your interest, pick up Cather's My Antonia and then O Pioneers. If you all do, we're pretty sure that you'll become just like the Cather-loving Ken Burns, and if subsequent generations follow suit, the name Willa might top the baby name charts. Just a thought. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for joining me for Selected Shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimkin, Vivienne Woodward, and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Miles B. Smith. Our programs presented at the Getty Center in Los Angeles are recorded by Phil Richards. Our mix engineer for this episode was Mie White. Our theme music is David Peterson's That's the Deal, performed by the Deardorff-Peterson Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space.