daron aric hagen

I grew up in a big, beautiful, drafty, Frank Lloyd Wright-style cedar house ringed with eight foot high picture windows in New Berlin, Wisconsin into which my parents had poured as much money as they had. My mother was a sculptor, visual artist and writer; she was also a gifted gardener who cultivated dozens of different irises, roses and annuals.

When I was small, Father was the breadwinner; he would leave Milwaukee on Monday mornings and return home on Friday nights, each week slightly more unraveled from the fabric of our family's life than the last. Sometime during the late sixties, my parents—while I, for whom they couldn't find a sitter, waited in the car—went from one Chicago Loop hotel to the next for hours one awful night, looking for her beloved brother, a sensitive, talented visual artist who had taken his life.

Proud, hard-working gardeners, in the summer we would buy bags of cocoa bean shells from the Ambrosia chocolate factory and spread them over the generous, manicured flower-beds. The smell, in the midday sun, was an intoxicating mélange of cocoa and countryside, the aromas of the various flowers mingling with freshly-mown grass.

Mother was a writing protégé of Mari Sandoz at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. After serving as a radio man in the Navy, Father courted her there, earned a law degree, and promised her that he was going to support the family so that she could pursue her Art and together they could raise their children. After graduation, he worked for the American Bar Association. At some point they moved from the flat on Milwaukee's South Side that they rented on the second floor of my grandmother's house to the place they bought in New Berlin.

Mother loved the wren's call, and managed to entice at least one to move in each summer. She disliked blue jays ('Nasty, bossy birds,' she would say, stubbing out her Pall Mall and pulling on her gardening gloves) and crows, and fought multi-year battles with a very intelligent squirrel we named Ralph, who seemed able to pillage every birdfeeder we installed. The cicadas each summer were deafening. I'd run into the middle of the lawn, close my eyes, lean my head as far back as it would go, feel the sun on my face, spin around, and imagine I was swimming in the hot, healthy air above me, awakened after a seventeen-year-long subterranean slumber.

She wrote short stories and submitted them to the big east coast magazines: The New Yorker, Dial, Saturday Review, Ladies' Home Journal, and so forth. Her cover letters were written on stationary inscribed with our home's name, Brightwood, and the return address. She raised her three sons, made Art, submitted manuscripts.

On the weekends, Father set his sons to work beautifying the yard. We designed and erected retaining walls from truckloads of broken concrete, built traffic bond pathways, cut down trees. Father built for my brothers and me a sandbox nestled into a crook of the stream surrounding our property that was as big as a tennis court in which I constructed labyrinthine sand cities. What began as a request for permission to throw up a few boards in the crotch of a tree turned into a multi-summer project to construct a scale version of our own home, with running electricity, windows, and a porch perched on fifteen foot high stilts.

I recall standing in Denoon Lake as a very, very young child. I looked back to the beach and watched my mother doing the Saturday Review acrostic, having spent a perfect summer day collecting interesting stones from the lake bottom and piling them on the dock for her to admire.

I remember summer evenings at the Blue Mound Drive-In, falling asleep with my brothers in the back of a lumbering old station wagon that we called 'Thunder-n-Lightning' halfway into the first film of a double feature, orange Nesbit soda, Dad's Root Beer, Graf's 50-50, piles of sandwiches doled out by my mother from a green wicker hamper, the drowsy bliss of being carried in from the car to the house afterwards over Father's shoulder, with heat lightning flashing above and gravel crunching beneath his feet. He smelled good then—like Mennen aftershave and Borkum Riff pipe tobacco, sweat and Ivory soap.

My ancestors on one side came to Upstate Wisconsin from Norway (the Skajestaads-from the town of Hagen, which means 'garden' in Norwegian) and on the other Ireland (the Taffes-we're related to President Taft) during the 1800's. I was at first shocked, and then deeply moved by the fact that the people who figured in the Charles Van Schaik photographs (as featured in Michael Lesy's book Wisconsin Death Trip) looked uncannily like the ones in our family's photo albums; the stories in the book were eerily similar to the family lore I had grown up hearing.

We kept country dogs and cats, rabbits and guinea pigs, snakes and turtles; Father fed bags of day old bread to the several families of raccoons that lived under the garage. I spent entire days making believe I was Le Long Carabine in the woods surrounding our property, crying 'My death is a great honor to the Huron, take me!' to no one in particular.One night, shortly after having seen The Ten Commandments at the Drive-in, playing Moses on the back porch as a 'ringy-ding-ding-ding' party tootled away in the neighbor's backyard, I declaimed at the top of my prepubescent voice, 'GO TO GOD!' heard Sinatra's voice ('Strangers in the Night') stop abruptly, a record player scratch to a halt, and a glass shatter in the ensuing silence. I spent my earliest remembered days playing at her feet while Mother made Art. The long stretches of silence were broken only by the susurrus of wind, bird calls, the classical music she so loved, and the steady thrum of cicadas. I was drawn to the piano because my older brother Kevin, whom I idolized, was a gifted pianist. At the same time that I first noticed the numbers tattooed on our piano teacher's forearm I discovered on a very high shelf, along with a lot of other books about the Holocaust, an oversized book of horrifying photographs called Despotism. As soon as I discovered their existence, I returned to the pictures every time I had the chance.

I was tested by the school district and sent to kindergarten a year early. Around the age of six I began repeating silently afterwards everything that I said. Like some other obsessive compulsive children, I developed early on a prophetic, unequivocal, almost resigned feeling that I would die young; that feeling, combined with the discovery of my namesake Daron's death certificate, motivated me to grow up as quickly as possible, while living for two.

My ancestor Dorn, a devout Lutheran who, wrongly-accused of making off with an envelope from the Sunday collection plate (it was later found exactly where he had said it was) and poorly treated by his brethren, hung himself. I recall the summer I was told about him—a summer otherwise spent contentedly working on my uncle Clifford's dairy farm somewhere just shy of the Upper Peninsula bailing hay, shoveling shit, and being justly, gently and affectionately mocked for being a city-slicker from Milwaukee.

Although I didn't yet know I would become a composer (that happened when, a few years later, my family gave me the score of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd), I did decide one day, at the age of seven, in 1968, to become a musician. Kenneth Schermerhorn was conducting the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra; they were performing the Largo of Antonin Dvořák's Ninth Symphony.

In the deep winter, beautiful sheets of ice formed over our lovely home's picture windows, making them seem like frosted Depression glass. Heat escaped through the roof, so immense, glittering, dangerous icicles—some as long as ten feet and too heavy to lift—hung down from the eaves like enormous fangs. My brothers and I used to knock them down with shovels. Much of the tar and gravel roof was flat, and required shoveling after a heavy snow. It leaked steadily in every season, sort of like a grand upside down ark, or—as I fantasized as a child lying on my back on the floor and looking up into the front room's lofty rafters—a capsized Viking Longship.

By the age of thirteen I had already begun to think of myself as a composer, spending three or four hour each day at the piano. After two years I began taking lessons from a sweet-natured young man at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Father ferried me to them, forty minutes in each direction. I remember nothing about what we talked about during those weekly trips, only that I dreaded them. Around this time, mother caused father to agree that, if I were sitting at the piano, I would not be disturbed. After that, I began not just composing and practicing at the piano, but taking my meals and doing my homework there.

Mother's manuscripts were returned in big manila envelopes. Sometimes they hadn't even been opened. Not a single one was accepted. She had better luck when she used a mail drop in Chicago as her return address. The rejection letters from the same magazines that I have good friends and colleagues published in and working at today that she used to read, standing in her Midwestern kitchen, surrounded by children, the odor of pot-roast, and a husband running to fat, must have been devastating. It broke my heart when my mother stopped making art; I think it broke hers, too. By the time I was twelve, she stopped saving the rejection slips. When I was fifteen years old everything—the manuscripts, the slips, the letterhead, the typewriter—disappeared; she destroyed them all, gave away the typewriter, and stopped writing entirely. Even the clay and the paints were thrown out.

As the neighborhoods around us grew, so did the volume of seasonal run-off into what I recalled as a child as having been a charming brook ringing our property; by the time I was eleven, heavy rainstorms typically filled the basement of the house with several feet of water, the six-inch-deep brook became a dangerous eight foot deep river, and the sprawling backyard, into which we had poured hundreds and hundreds of hours of manual labor and so much love under our father's stern command, became a flood plain, covered with a half a foot of muck. Heartbreaking.

Around this time, I began to pretend I was asleep when Father returned from Chicago on Friday nights. He could tell. It must have hurt him terribly. It was explained that Father would now be at home all the time; he and Mother had decided that he would be happier in private practice. Mother would get a job to help make ends meet. She started as a maid at a Ramada Sands hotel managed by her brother Garth, moved into paste-up at a local advertising agency, then copy-writing, layout, and so on; she learned fast, and, by the time I left for college, she served as the creative director of a glossy regional magazine, supplanting Father as the family's principal breadwinner.

Mother took my older brother Kevin and me to New York City when I was fifteen. Kevin trembled with excitement as we stood together in the middle of Lincoln Center Plaza and gazed up into the beautiful Chagall tapestries hanging behind the tall glass windows of the Metropolitan Opera. She took us to see John Cullum in Shenandoah. I have a clear memory of seeing Raul Julia's terrifying turn as Macheath in Threepenny Opera at the Mitzi Newhouse, of loving the production, but of feeling betrayed by the new translation—I was already a Blitzstein partisan, proud of having been cast—along with my other brother Britt—by Kevin as members of Mackie's gang in a production he had produced and directed. We walked in Central Park, ate vichyssoise in an overpriced sidewalk café in Midtown (I now walk past the spot and think of her every time I go to my club) and rode the Staten Island Ferry. I recall the satisfaction my mother took in me when, viewing a picture at the Met together, I noted how 'beautiful' the man in it was. 'Yes, men can be beautiful,' she said, wistfully. I treasure a single memory of our mother hugging Kevin and me around the shoulders and telling us that we could accomplish anything in life; that as long as we did our best, nobody could ever think ill of us. I determined one day to become a New Yorker. At the age of twenty-three, I did. I've lived in Manhattan ever since.

After the worst of a series of floods, my parents allowed—except for a sliver near the house—the  yard to run back. It was verdant, but neglected, loved but untended. It was painful to look at. The house was only about thirty years old, but it felt older. It was hard not to think of what the place had been and what it had become as a metaphor for what had become of our family.

Father's depressions lengthened; the distance between my parents increased. The beautiful house they both loved and where we all lived became a hotel: the upper floors were Ours; the lower half was His. My brothers left for college; I slept at home but rarely saw my parents. I disappeared into music, after-school activities, and late-night double features at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee.

I left for the University of Wisconsin myself after a discouraging audition at Juilliard. In the middle of my second year in Madison I was accepted by Ned Rorem as a pupil at the Curtis Institute of Music. I shall forever be grateful to him for having done so. I moved to Philadelphia. According to Ned's diary, my first lesson occurred on 15 September, 1981; I was nineteen, 'the new one from Madison, bearded, bright, and seething with a desire to please.'

A few months later, Mother was diagnosed with a particularly virulent type of lung cancer, but concealed the news from me. When I finally learned of it, I insisted upon returning from Philadelphia to take care of her. I was sure that the Curtis would grant me a leave of absence. 'Christ no,' she said, with a degree of passion that absolutely barred discussion. 'I want you to get on with your life.' I returned to Philadelphia. I spoke to her on Saturday mornings for twenty minutes, made do with writing proud, excited letters home. I returned to the beautiful old cedar house for the last time in December of 1983.

That was when I placed the Tylenol in her mouth, chased it with a finger of amaretto. Her cancer had spread everywhere. The doctors had sent her home to die. It was one of those stupid, small, cold winter hours. She writhed on the floor at the foot of the bed, where she had collapsed on her way to the bathroom to throw up. Cigarette burns in the carpet. Why was I, their twenty-year-old son, sitting on the floor, cradling his mother's head? Her husband, my father, was downstairs in his den, playing Solitaire. 'I love you more than I can say,' she said, stroking my face. Her eyes rolled. I gently wiped the crusts of sputum from the corners of her mouth. 'Oh, Lord,' she sighed through her pain, 'the dosage wasn't high enough.' She looked at me with pity as I held her. 'I was hoping to die tonight, Sweetheart,' she said, looking up at me like an infant seeking the breast. A few hours later, after murmuring 'Well honey, I was never bored,' she did.