Pauline is scooting around on the rug in pursuit of a tolerant orange cat. She is large for her age, possibly of Han descent, Rebecca says, a theory they have developed because of her big bones and also because of her head shape, which is broad and slightly flat. They haven’t mapped her DNA. She is an attractive child who radiates a confident intelligence. Pauline, who is named for Esther Gottesfeld’s younger sister Pauline, who died in the Triangle fire, cruises over to the coffee table and studies the blinking light on the visitor’s tape recorder very seriously, putting her face closer and closer, but she doesn’t reach out to grab it or even touch it. When asked why they chose to go to China for their baby, Rebecca’s reply is a succinct and rebuking, “because that’s where Pauline was.”

Still in his duffel coat, George Botkin has sat down at his piano. He rolls an ascending A-minor arpeggio and starts to play the already-familiar opening bars of the Duet. Pauline crows excitedly and raises her arms to be picked up, abandoning all interest in the tape recorder now. Instead of picking her up, Botkin reaches for her toy xylophone at his feet, and he drops down to sit cross-legged on the rug beside her, with the colorful xylophone in front of them on the low coffee table. He shrugs out of his coat and hands her one of the xylophone mallets and indicates a note for her to play, an A, which is red. Pauline understands, and as he picks up the other mallet and strikes the neat musical phrases that open the Duet, she plays her A note with solemn purpose, in perfect time to the joyful melody. It is indeed a duet.

Fifteen

“Music is especially contemporary in significance because it is a thing which exists only in sound, a complex phenomenon of tone combinations organized by a rhythmic pattern in time rather than space. It parades past the senses, leaving no trace save in the listener’s mind. Unless he can read musical notation, the listener has no way of apperceiving the music as a whole other than by recreating it in his own imagination.”

—from A Guide to Musical Styles by Douglas Moore, W. W. Norton, 1962

The critics would, in the days, months, and years ahead, call the Triangle Oratorio “a uniquely postmodern amalgamation” with a “melodic inventiveness” and a “powerfully insistent searing narrative impact” that gives it a “bold complexity and authenticity” that honors the lives lost to the Triangle factory fire with a “vigorous affirmation that is at once elegiac and celebratory.” There would be comparisons to Gershwin, to Copland, and yes, to Mendelssohn. But on the actual night of March 25, at the Isaac Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall, with every seat occupied, the 2,804 souls present have no such fine analytic words. The audience that night has no words at all as the music sweeps over them and blasts them and scorches them.