Limbo

by A. Manette Ansay

  My first year at Peabody, I was studying Brahms to my heart’s content, working my way through the intermezzi, and there were nights I could almost imagine I was conjuring scenes from the composer’s childhood, the seedy Hamburg district where he’d been raised. I loved to imagine him as an adolescent, walking home past the women on the corners, past the bars and beggars, a lonely figure made lonelier still by his talent, his singular, private vision. I loved to imagine his unreturned passion for Clara Schumann, how he’d lived his life alone—without lover or child—until it ended, one year after her death. I believed that the soul of an artist could only be wrought by such personal suffering, could only be redeemed by offering oneself up to Art and Art alone. By fulfilling every sacrifice it demanded. By remaking oneself as an empty vessel to be filled, and filled again.

  As a child, I’d read and reread the Lives of the Saints, studying the martyrs as if their lives were a map I longed to follow: Saint Martina, who bled milk after the emperor cut off her breasts; Saint Fausta, who endured one thousand nails hammered into her skull; Saint Euphemia, whose limbs were ripped from her body. Now it was the lives of dead composers and living virtuosi I emulated, lingering over their hardships, their sacrifices, their pain. Practice and prayer, music and God, the discipline of the Conservatory and the discipline of the Church—over time, the two had become inextricably intertwined, for the truth was that I needed the first to maintain the second. Music was the purest language I knew, the bridge between what I was supposed to believe and what I knew in my heart to be true. And that truth, too frightening for me to fully acknowledge, was this: I was falling away from the Church. I was losing my faith.

  Sunday after Sunday, I sat at the back of Saint Ignatius Church, trying my best not to argue with the gospel, with the priest’s homily, with the Bible’s glorification of violence, bigotry, intolerance. Little things irked me. I had not yet read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, but I, too, couldn’t understand why Christ would drive demons out of a man, only to inflict them on a herd of pigs. Why didn’t Christ just kill the demons, for Pete’s sake? I’d grown up with pigs. I liked pigs. Weren’t they God’s creatures, too? Then there was the story of Job, a good man tortured by God, just because He feels the testosterone urge to show off for the devil. And what about Martha’s sister, Mary, sitting at Christ’s feet? Mary, rubbing those feet with expensive oil and drying them with her hair? Clearly, Christ is enjoying himself like any other red-blooded man, for when Mary’s sister, Martha, points out that the oil might have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor, Christ tells her, in effect, to butt out. “The poor will always be with us,” he says, “but the son of man comes only once.”

  Yeah, grumbled my brain, my old grandfather would come, if some babe sat between his knees that way, rubbing her hair between his toes.

  Then I’d recollect myself. I was thinking about Christ, the Son of God. God, who could strike me dead if He felt like it. Shut up, shut up, I’d tell my brain, and when it rebelled, I flooded it with Hail Marys. I pinched my thigh beneath my Sunday skirt. I tried to prepare myself to take Communion, the actual body and blood of Christ, into the temple of the Holy Ghost that was my body.

  So you’re a cannibal, is that it? jeered my brain.

  It was hopeless. I fled the church in despair, returned to the practice rooms.

  It was words, I finally decided, that were at the root of my trouble. How could you worship something as infinite as God with something as finite as language? No wonder I was tormented by doubts, contradictions, oxymorons that couldn’t be reconciled. Faith had to rise above all that while words, born of reason, pulled you down into the muck, rubbed your face in your own human quirks and questionings. I hated words, their gradations and shadings, the way a thing could be argued one way, slanted another, depending on who was using it. I’d left my required freshman comp course with a gentlewoman’s C, delighted by the thought that I’d never again have to analyze another poem, or story, or essay.

  So then why couldn’t I stop analyzing my faith?

  I made an appointment with the sweet old priest at Saint Ignatius, and together, we arrived at this analogy. The world was very much like a complicated piece of music. When you first saw the score, you couldn’t make sense of anything right away. It seemed chaotic, random, out of control. But if you broke everything down, page by page, stanza by stanza, over time you came to understand what sounds went where and why. You saw that the notes were a kind of path leading to a place you’d never seen before, and yet, had always been there, waiting for you to notice. The fault had been in the limitation of the beholder, not the breadth and scope of the view. That’s why it was important to trust God, who had a better view of things, a more complete picture, than you alone ever could.

  I thanked the old priest gratefully. I wanted so desperately to believe what he was saying—for the sake of my soul, but also for the sake of my physical self. I wanted to believe that the same truth could apply to what was happening to me. My arms were growing more and more painful, and yet I forced myself to the practice rooms, where I put in four and five hours of practice each day. If it were God’s will for me to hurt this way, I would have to accept it as part of His plan. This, like all things, was happening for a reason, and all these reasons were born like seeds within the infinite mind of God.

  The thought of ceasing to believe in such logic, of stepping away from it, of embracing my life as an open-ended mystery left me feeling as if I was falling, falling, like one of those dreams in which you wake up just before you land. How could you live in the world if you didn’t believe in cause and effect, in a greater pattern and purpose? If you didn’t trust that the trials you faced were designed for you specifically by a loving and all-knowing God? This idea got complicated whenever I thought about things like droughts and plagues and genocide, so, well, I simply didn’t think about those things. No, I believed in my own self-importance; I believed in the sparrow’s fall. If I tripped walking out of music theory, there must be a reason beyond my own embarrassment: a lesson to be learned, a purposeful delay that would keep me from arriving in the next moment ahead of schedule. I thanked God for allowing me to trip. I put myself fully into His hands. Everything was a sign of his favor or, at least, His recognition, and if I wasn’t able to interpret these signs, the fault could be only my own.

  “Can I ask you something?” Susan said one day as we came back from the showers. “Why do you keep a penny pinned to your underwear?”

  A penny? Could she mean my old Saint Benedict medal, which I still wore, hanging it from a little gold pin? Each pair of underwear I owned had a series of pinprick holes around the waistband; when I showered, I held the medal in my mouth, so that I wouldn’t be parted from it even for a moment. I tried to explain about Saint Benedict, about the vow I’d taken when I was a child, about protection from Satan. I tried, and then I stopped. It all sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous and, yet, I couldn’t let it go.

  “I wear it,” I told her honestly, fighting tears, “because I am afraid to take it off.”

  Susan nodded kindly, diplomatically. She was, by her own definition, ‘culturally Jewish.’ “You want me to sit with you while you try?”

  We went to her room, still in our robes, and sat down on her bed. I unpinned my Saint Benedict medal and handed it to her. By now I was sobbing. I knew the devil was going to get me. I knew my arms were hurting as punishment for my doubts. I also knew that such thoughts were absolute nonsense. At last, I understood the Holy Trinity: three states of mind in one.

  “Do you want it back?” Susan asked, but I shook my head. What I wanted was the smug security of my childhood faith, everything divided into rules and rows laid out as clearly as a cornfield. Ask and ye shall receive. Faith the size of a mustard seed grain. What I wanted was to return to the deep sleep of that faith. What I wanted was my arms to feel better.

  Even in the fall of my sophomore year, when I had to start wearing night splints, I did
not cut back on my practicing. Conservatory students thought of themselves as athletes; no pain, no gain. I was careful to remove the splints before I left my room, so nobody would find out. Leigh knew about them, of course, the way she knew I’d been going to a sports medicine specialist at Johns Hopkins for ultrasound therapy and shots of cortisone. Susan knew about the splints, too, but nobody else did—not even my piano teacher. An actual injury was serious, but rumors of an injury could be equally damaging. When chamber music groups were assembled, when nominations for awards were announced, when lists declared which of us were eligible for scholarships and competitions, the names of the injured—those who were inconsistent, unreliable—were conspicuously absent.

  Yet, injuries were commonplace, particularly among pianists, particularly among female pianists. A girl one floor down from me fractured her arm landing a Beethoven chord. Another suffered permanent nerve damage in her right fourth finger. Nearly everyone, regardless of their instrument, went to the practice rooms armed with a variety of compresses, wraps and Ace bandages, sports creams, and anti-inflammatories. The air reeked of Tiger Balm and Ben-Gay and Aspercreme. In the dorms, there was always someone lying on a heating pad. We scheduled appointments for vitamin shots and physical therapy and Swedish massage, and when these treatments failed, we caught the train to D.C. where there was an acupuncturist—his telephone number was passed hand to hand—who gave discounts to Conservatory students. And if Dr. Xu couldn’t help you, well, then you gritted your teeth and played through. Now and then, somebody else would pack up their dorm room and head back home, ostensibly to return after a semester of “rest,” which meant we would never see them again. We mourned them, of course, but recovered soon enough to squabble over the gigs they’d abandoned, the seats they’d vacated in the various ensembles. There was always a sense that the people who left were the ones who hadn’t wanted it enough, the ones who hadn’t been hungry. We, the survivors, were the hungry ones. We were eager to be tested, to prove ourselves. We were in our teens and early twenties, the age when you believe you control your own life like a beautiful kite on the end of a string.

  My hero that fall was one of the master instructors, an internationally renowned pianist who’d been unable to perform for a decade until, thanks to est and lecithin, the tendinitis in his hands began to heal. A comeback performance had already been scheduled with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for the spring. It was to be a gala event, and everybody talked about the way a lesser man would have given up, packed in the towel, settled into an honorable teaching career. Whenever the burning in my forearms and wrists forced me to pause during a lesson, my own instructor reminded me of the master instructor’s difficulties—and his upcoming triumph.

  “It takes heart,” my instructor would say, spraying my outstretched arms with a topical analgesic she ordered from Germany. It came in a slender, silver can, and it felt like ice when it hit your skin. She kept a second can by the door so you could blast yourself when you first came in. “Do you have heart? Because if you don’t, get the hell off the Good Ship Lollipop.”

  She had two stock lectures she administered to students in her studio, reinoculating us throughout the semester. The first, and most frequent, was Never End Up a Teacher. The second was Never Marry for Love. “Marry for love,” she’d say, “and you’ll spend your life raising puppies.”

  They didn’t make women like that in Wisconsin. I adored her. If she’d told me to practice with thumbtacks pushed into my fingertips, I’d probably have obeyed.

  She was somewhere in her thirties and dramatically beautiful, and when I looked at the man she’d married—a bulbous old fool of a violinist who spent most of his energy attempting to seduce his undergraduates—it was clear she was in no danger of falling victim to anybody’s charms. Her career as a performer had come to an end because of chronic back pain; she often walked with a cane. On particularly bad days, she stood through the lesson. On worse days still, she paced, her breath coming in hard little puffs. I left the studio feeling as if my own pain was nothing but an excuse, a symptom of my own lack of focus. I resolved to work harder. I ate lecithin like gumdrops. I got another round of cortisone shots, swallowed aspirin until my ears rang, renewed my prescriptions for anti-inflammatories and then lied to the doctor about the side effects: abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss. I even visited the acupuncturist, but by the end of my third semester, I couldn’t shampoo my hair properly because I couldn’t keep my arms raised above my head that long. Instead, I slapped the shampoo on my head, then stood directly under the shower stream, hoping the force of the water would drill the soap into my hair.

  Fortunately, I could keep my arms at waist level while I was playing the piano, but other problems were cropping up: holding a pencil to take notes, gripping a knife to cut meat, lowering something down from my high closet shelf. Trying to run scales, I slurred notes hopelessly, and there were times my hands grew so numb I had to look to see where they were. When I spoke to my parents on the phone, the receiver kept slipping out of my grasp.

  “Fine, everything’s fine,” I said. “Just dropped the phone.”

  And then there were the problems I was having with, well, my legs. Who had ever heard of such a thing? My legs weren’t nearly as bad as my arms, but if I walked too far too fast, they’d start to burn, and when I jogged, it took several days to recover. Pain up and down my shins, along the insides of my legs from ankle to knee, sometimes across the top of my feet, particularly my right foot. Sometimes, this foot didn’t quite want to pull up after I’d take a step, and this mystified and embarrassed me.

  Now I was truly frightened. Was I psychosomatically ill? I made another appointment with the sports medicine specialist I’d been seeing at Johns Hopkins. He injected my wrists and elbows with more cortisone and had me fitted with new wrist braces I was supposed to wear while I was practicing, writing, cutting up food. Then he sent me to another specialist, a neurologist, who had me walk around the exam room so that he could evaluate my gait. He asked me to close my eyes and touch my nose. He pricked my feet with pins and asked if it felt dull or sharp.

  “Your right foot gets tired?” he said. He thought about it for a moment. “Which foot do you use to work the pedals on the piano?”

  “The right, mostly,” I said.

  “Try using your left foot instead.”

  I felt stupid for bringing it up.

  In December 1983, I headed home to Wisconsin for winter break. There, for the next three weeks, I took my health seriously. I forced myself to take a break from the piano—no cheating, no short sessions, nothing. I wore my wrist braces every day. I washed down the anti-inflammatories with milkshakes and big, starchy meals, trying to console my stomach. Mornings, I slept late; afternoons, I visited relatives; nights, I watched videos with friends. I spent a week out at Grandma Krier’s farm, sleeping beside her in the old double bed just as I had when I was younger. She had sent a check to Rome in November, after my mother had first told her about the problems I was having. Any day now, she assured me, a Mass would be said for my intentions. Any day now, I should be feeling better.

  And by the end of my vacation, I could report, truthfully, that I did feel much better than I had. I was sleeping through the night again; my arms and legs no longer woke me with their buzz and burn. I could walk all the way from her house to Great Uncle Joe and Aunt Eleanor’s, a quarter mile down the road, and sit in their living room quite comfortably, admiring their Christmas tree.

  “Take it easy,” my mother pleaded with me as she drove me back to the airport. I promised I would, and I kept that promise. Back in Baltimore, I took the bus to my part-time job at the theater. I practiced no more than two hours a day. But within a few weeks, all my symptoms had returned. I couldn’t keep up with my piano lesson preps, and in March, I withdrew from ensemble. I relied on the braces more and more, not only at the piano, but taking notes, raising and lowering my cereal spoon, anything that required repetitive motion. By now, my inju
ries were common knowledge, impossible to conceal, and when midsemester grades came due, my teacher told me that the time had come to stop making excuses.

  “I understand,” I said, forcing myself to look unconcerned. We’d just spent yet another lesson on music theory, because I hadn’t been able to prepare that week’s assignment.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “I’m giving the A you would have had, if it weren’t for all this.” She waved her hands at my braces.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said. “Listen to me. If this doesn’t resolve itself soon, you’ll need to rethink your major.” She gave me a hard, keen look that wasn’t without sympathy. “There’s a good music therapy program at Hopkins,” she said. “I had a student several years back who transferred, graduated on schedule, got a job working at a clinic somewhere. A good job. Something with autistic children. I could make a few calls.”

  It had been a long time since she’d talked to me about the master instructor, held up his difficulties as an example, reminded me that all it took was heart—an omission that seemed particularly telling, for his comeback performance was only a week away. You couldn’t open up the local paper without seeing something about it. There were posters up on every bulletin board. There’d been an interview on public radio. Did she think I’d lost my drive? Did she think I wanted to settle down and raise puppies? I couldn’t believe that she, of all people, was suggesting I become a teacher.

  “That will not be necessary,” I said. I spoke as firmly as I could. “I’m going to get better.”

  “Of course you’re going to get better,” she snapped. “But when? Because you don’t have two, three, five years to wait. If you’re going to have a career, things need to happen for you now. You’ve already lost a semester, and frankly, I don’t foresee any improvement.”

  I left the studio furious, determined to show my teacher she was wrong. Who was to say I wouldn’t recover? Who was to say this wouldn’t be just one of many marvelous anecdotes I’d tell some day, after I became successful, after I’d demonstrated the power of positive thinking? The master instructor’s public radio interview had been filled with such marvelous anecdotes. He was practicing hard these days, getting ready; I sometimes sat outside his practice room door to listen. I figured that if I couldn’t practice myself, the next best thing was hearing somebody else at work, following along with the score. I got permission to sit in on friends’ lessons. I spent hours in the listening lab, memorizing concertos and symphonies.