by Mary Elizabeth (Leach) Raines
As an admitted foodie, I tend to remember past events by what I ate, even dates with men that I went on more than half a century ago. While I have clear recollections of the food that was consumed, I often don’t remember the guy I was with, something that those who know me tease me about. But I do remember both things well from a date I had with a young man named Henry Mollicone. In my mind, he will always be connected to jamoca almond fudge ice cream.
Henry and I were students together at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music during the 1960s. I was a piano major, but I hung out with the composers, a small handful of mind-blowingly brilliant and utterly nerdy young men: my people. Henry, who was a year older than I and a superb pianist, was the school’s most lauded student composer. His gifts far overshadowed those of the rest of us, even though all the students had to be tremendously talented just to gain admission to the conservatory, which was at the time one of the top three music schools in the country.
How unfair it is to summarize someone’s lifetime of work in two sentences, yet I’m going to do that. Throughout his life, Henry composed lots of beautiful music, taught at universities, led a music festival, wrote and orchestrated scores for movies, had a stint assisting Leonard Bernstein on Broadway, and conducted orchestras, including the New York City Opera. The Washington Post called him “…one of the most distinctive American opera composers.” The fact that he wound up with his own Wikipedia page is a testament to his skills.
Henry was a short little guy with curly dark hair, the proud member of a large Italian family from Providence, Rhode Island. Height aside, he was at times capable of having a commanding and confident presence. I say “at times” because his appearance fluctuated. Often he came across as geeky and aloof, which befitted his title of composer, and yet occasionally, in the right light and the right mood, Henry would shift and become a handsome and charismatic man in a heart-melting kind of way. In either posture, along with possessing an overabundance of talent and musical intelligence, he was quirky.
I was pretty sure that one of Henry's quirks was a preference for blondes and busty sopranos, so I was both stunned and pleased when he spontaneously invited me to get some ice cream with him one evening. Even though we both socialized with the same small crowd, I’d always placed him on a pedestal. He was a guy I had considered to be out of reach. And now I had a (kind of) date with him!
He and I walked several blocks from the Conservatory to Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor, which is where the jamoca almond fudge ice cream comes in, as that was what I ordered. Ah, I pine for those youthful days when one could chow down such goodies with no misgivings and still retain a great figure! Unlike most of my other rendezvous where the food was more outstanding than the guy, I recall Henry vividly and the delightful chat that we had. Our conversation was one of sweet discovery, and I was happy to discover that this impressive fellow was, after all, a swell and rather vulnerable human being: a regular person, and a likable one.
After our treats, we went to his apartment that was right off Boston’s Copley Square to talk some more. It was growing late, so rather than walk me all the way to the conservatory dormitory and then back, Henry decided that I should spend the night, and he invited me to climb into his bed. He crawled in next to me, of course. Even though we both felt that we were terribly grown up, we were truly only just barely past being teenagers, so the fact that he had a roommate who seemed to be sound asleep in a twin bed across the room was somehow not seen as a deterrent.
I’d of course admired Henry, but up until then I had not considered being romantically interested in him. With his warm body next to mine, however, I found to my surprise that I was attracted to him. He and I wound up kissing, as college-aged kids are prone to do, especially when they are tired and their guard is down. His kisses were quite delicious, even better than the jamoca almond fudge had been.
Despite the fact that we were awfully drowsy, after more kissing, I wanted to push our make-out session to the next level. When I offered, he whispered quite tenderly, “No, no, you’re not that kind of girl.” While kissing my neck. (Or maybe I was kissing his neck. I forget.) Gosh, I tried ever so hard to convince him that yes, I was that kind of girl, but he stubbornly resisted and there was nothing I could do to change his mind, so to my disappointment, our encounter never evolved beyond a little bit of pleasant necking.
Henry certainly liked me well enough to kiss me. Who knows? Maybe he had only gotten cuddly because of the sugar high from the ice cream. In looking back now, I wonder if saying that I wasn’t that kind of girl was a polite way of telling me that he was not that into me, because there had certainly been other girls who’d entered his life who, it seems, were that kind of girl. Then again, I was neither blonde nor a soprano. Sigh.
I moved on and never held it against him, nor did I pine for him. Well, not much. (Read on). Today I realize that should a romance have ensued, I would have been a dim satellite to Henry’s bright and growing star, which is not a role that would have suited me. Adding to that, he was more than a little bit crazy, although I confess that this quality in a man has never particularly deterred me.
A few months passed and I turned my attention to other boys. Then Henry gave a concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where only topnotch musicians were invited to perform—this before he had even graduated. But, as I already told you, he was an exceptional pianist. He played the difficult Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor. I have in my long life heard many concerts by the top pianists in the world, and yet the best musical performance I ever heard in my life, hands down, was this one given by Henry.
I arrived late, just as the concert was beginning, and rather than trek up to the plush hall where the audience had assembled, I decided to remain several stories below in the magnificent interior courtyard of that museum, an eclectic and priceless mixture of Roman, Renaissance, and Medieval artwork and designs. (The museum would some years later become the site of one of the world’s most famous art heists when 13 invaluable paintings were stolen, never to be recovered.) I sat there alone amidst ancient statues, ornate columns, fountains, and, on that particular spring day, hundreds of fragrant Easter Lillies. As Henry began to play, the notes of this passionate piece of music echoed down through the high arches surrounding me and poured over me in a cascade of ecstasy. Yes, okay, I am gushing, but words are insufficient to describe the shivering impact of the music. His playing touched my soul in a way that in well over half a century since has never been replicated…which kind of makes me wonder how that other performance might have felt, had he not decided that I was “not that kind of girl.”
After the concert was over, with my attraction to Henry newly reignited, I was eager to congratulate this man with whom, albeit briefly, I’d shared a bed. I went to the reception room where he was surrounded by an admiring throng. As I started to make my way toward him, a brassy blonde wearing an inappropriately gaudy and super-tight dress—a trampy-looking female who was obviously not a fellow music student—moved close to him and to my dismay snuggled right up against him. Worse, he seemed to like it. She didn’t appear to be the type who would be into Liszt. Now, I will grant that my memory may be distorted. While this girl might in reality have been a Very Nice Cultured Person, from my depressed perspective she was quite obviously that kind of girl. The kind I wasn’t. I was overcome with jealousy, and went home without congratulating him.
The very last time I saw Henry in person occurred a few years after we were out of the conservatory. I had bravely gone to audition as an actress for a big-deal children’s theater in Boston. I say bravely, because I was nervous; they wanted me both to perform a monologue and sing a song. The monologue wasn’t what made me nervous. I’d already been in a number of plays, and I loved to act, so I had no qualms about that part of the try-out. It was the singing that got me jittery. I’ve always been shy about singing by myself in front of other people, especially people who are listening to me with a critical ear. I badly wanted to join the theater troupe, however, so I rehearsed my song a lot and hoped for the best.
When it was my turn, I anxiously climbed onstage. The director and his accomplices were seated in a little clump below in the darkened theater, and on the stage there was a grand piano with an audition accompanist waiting for me. As I walked toward it to hand my music over to the pianist, I saw with a shock that the person seated at the keyboard was none other than my very own jamoca-almond-fudge Henry! I handed him my music, and maybe said a quick hello, but my thoughts quickly turned back to the audition.
First I performed a monologue, something out of Tennessee Williams. Kiddos, I will confess here that I was really, really good. The director and his cohorts actually applauded me! I hoped that Henry was impressed. I glanced at him, but he had a professional-looking deadpan expression on his face.
Then it was time for me to sing. I nodded at Henry and he began playing the introduction to the tune I had chosen, which was from Anthony Newley’s musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd. At this point my great audition took a swift and unfortunate downturn. It was the very first time I’d ever sung for a theater audition, and to my horror, my voice did not come out at all in the mellow, rich way it had sounded in my apartment when I was practicing the song. The noise that emerged from my choked throat was creaky and croaky and weird. In short, it was abysmal. When I finished, the director, who had only minutes before applauded me, would not even make eye contact. Instead, he dismissed me with a terse thankyou-we’llletyouknow. Humiliated, I grabbed my music without daring to look at Henry and ducked out of the theater as fast as I could.
[Aside: Despite that failure, I persisted in auditioning for musicals, and in later years I actually did get a few singing parts, but that was only because I was cast as either a comedic or a deranged character, so my voice didn’t have to sound pretty. I like to assure myself that if I’d had a beautiful singing voice, it would have been a deterrent to those roles.]
Henry and I did not connect again until about ten years before his death. One of his offerings was that (for a fee, of course) he would compose a piece of music for someone based on the notes that correlated with their birthday, so my son and I pooled our resources and commissioned him to create a piano piece for my sister when she turned 70. She loved that gift! By this time, Henry was, as mentioned, an esteemed composer. And married to his second wife. He had achieved a fair amount of renown–I mean, jeez, his own Wikipedia page–although I always wished that he would have received even more fame and recognition than he did. For example, I don’t think that Aaron Copeland ever had to advertise that he would compose birthday tunes.
In our renewed friendship, which first took place over the phone and then via occasional emails, Henry was enthusiastic and warm; our conversations sometimes even bordered on the flirtatious...until one day when I asked how he was doing. He responded with an uncharacteristically cool email, stating that he had been dealing with some medical issues. His communications to me ceased after that. I later discovered that the medical issue was cancer that had begun to metastasize. A mutual friend of ours—curiously, the same man who had been the sound-asleep roommate in the other bed during Henry’s and my brief romantic encounter—shared that my former ice-cream date had fought valiantly for his life, but the cancer finally got him. Darn it.
Now you get to compose for the angels, Henry. Jamoca almond fudge ice cream will always belong to you. How lucky I was to have known you! I regret that I didn’t get to know you even better, but in retrospect, you were probably correct: as much as I yearned to be, I just wasn’t that kind of girl.
***
If you are a musician, a singer, or an opera or a choral conductor, you must absolutely check out his music. Even if you don’t fit in those categories, look him up on YouTube, and get a dose of beauty and wonder!
Below is a YouTube of him improvising a song based on the notes that correlate with a person’s phone number. Take a look and a listen–it’s shorter than two minutes–and you will be glad you did.
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