A Death in the Family (1986)

The stark folk tune that opens the opera establishes a contrast that pervades the work; the smallness of human beings huddled on this planet against the vast universe that surrounds them. The first figures we see are those of friends and neighbors making condolence calls to the Fallen home. Six-year-old Rufus stands outside the house, alone.

Scene 1: Rufus is mercilessly teased by older boys about his name.

Scene 2: Jay takes Rufus to a bar after they have seen a Charlie Chaplin movie. Suddenly Temperance Ladies descend. Walking home, Jay feels the loneliness and loss of a city man cut off from a country childhood.

Scene 3: At home Mary regrets Jay’s lack of piety but realizes that his bond with Rufus offsets his loneliness. Father Jackson, Mary’s prudish mentor, arrives and admonishes her not to tell young Rufus she is pregnant. “Tell him to prepare for a joyful surprise from heaven;’ Father Jackson advises. Mary is delighted with this advice, but Jay is most assuredly not. Later, Mary reveals another worry: Jay’s past addiction to alcohol and whether it may reoccur.

Scene 4: Ralph, Jay’s undertaker brother, shows up, drunk as usual. He accuses his wife Sally of making a play for his brother. Harmony is restored as the entire family climbs into a car to visit Great Granmaw. The scene closes with an aria reflective of the 104-year-old woman, “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”

Scene 5: We meet Victoria, Rufus’s black nurse, who is elated that he still remembers her. Her exultation turns to pain as he asks her, “Why is your skin so dark?” Rufus is bewildered to learn he can hurt someone he loves as much as Victoria.

Scene 6: Rufus, teased again, stands up for his name but is perplexed by the older boys’ comprehension of the “surprise” his mother has promised him. Mary and Jay argue about telling Rufus the truth about her pregnancy.

This crystallizes the conflict between Mary’s prudishness and Jay’s more relaxed attitudes. “There’s a gulf between us — one hundred miles, one thousand miles” Mary sings.

Scene I: Rufus is terrified by a nightmare. As Jay comforts him, he is drawn back into his own childhood. He recalls how he was comforted by his parents and they by parents before them, on back. The irretrievability of the past reawakens an urge to drink. Mary startles him out of his reverie, and they both realize their joy at the prospect of the coming baby.

Scene 2: Ralph telephones Jay in the middle of the night to tell him of their father’s serious heart attack. Jay decides to drive down that very night, unable to gauge the extent of his father’s illness because of Ralph’s drunken incoherence. He is touched by Mary’s making him breakfast at 3:00 A.M. and they half-parody a romantic duet from an operetta. soon realizing that it expresses their real feelings for one another. They say goodbye for the last
time.

Scene 3: Aunt Hannah takes Rufus shopping for a new cap, a purchase fraught with significance. After finding nothing at a genteel shop they proceed to a working-man’s store where Rufus picks the gaudiest cap on the shelf. This ushers in a fantasy: the tables are turned and Rufus triumphs over his tormentors.

Scene 1: Mary receives a telephone call that Jay has met with a serious car accident. She and Aunt Hannah have an agonizing wait for further news from her brother Andrew, who has driven to the site of the accident. As the clock ticks on and they hear nothing, she tries to hide her worst fears.

Scene 2: Andrew sweeps in: Jay is dead. Mary and her family have a laughing fit, monstrously inappropriate under the circumstances, but serving as relief from unbearable tension. Mary believes Jay’s ghost has entered the house. The entire family sings “Who shall tell the sorrow of being on this earth?”

Scene 3: Rufus is outside showing off, telling passersby “My Daddy is dead’.’ Jay’s voice, as Rufus’s conscience, reprimands him: “Don’t you brag’.’ When Rufus returns to the house, Mary reveals that the surprise he has been expecting is to be a baby. “Daddy wanted you to know’.’ Rufus then repeats what the older boys have told him, that Jay’s accident resulted from his being drunk. Mary, knowing that it was caused by a faulty linchpin, accepts Jay’s possible drinking. “And what if he was drunk?” She realizes that whatever gulf they felt between them was minute compared with that of death.

Scene 4: Andrew comes storming back after the funeral, furious that Father Jackson has refused to give Jay a decent burial, simply because he had never been baptized. Andrew comforts Rufus, however, by telling him how a magnificent butterfly flew straight up into the sky just as his father’s coffin was being lowered into the grave.

Scene 5: Rufus has another nightmare, but this time Jay is not there to comfort him. It is only now that the devastating loss of his father pierces him. He cries, “You can’t come home ever-not tomorrow or the next day or the next day or the next day!” His rage subsides, and he picks up a stuffed dog and flaps its ears as if they were butterfly wings.

William Mayer