by Noel Hynd
God, Rolf thought, how he hated that cold, and how funerals depressed him! And god, he thought, how he loved the warmth of Diana next to him.
“Let’s not dwell on this, Tiger,” she said to him. He smiled.
“Wish granted,” he said. The vehicle moved from a side street in Morningside Heights to Upper Broadway and turned downtown.
Tiger. The nickname that Diana had accidentally invented for him and which she alone called him. The first night they’d gone to bed together, she had said afterward that he made love to her “like a tiger.”
“You mean I smell like a big cat?” he had asked, teasing her. “A litter box?”
“I mean you drove this girl wild,” she had said. “‘Tiger.’”
The nickname had stuck.
He had no nickname for her. “Diana” fit as if it had been tailored. In Roman mythology Diana was the goddess of the hunt and also of the moon. Fittingly, they had first met in Rome on a terrace in moonlight, following a recital. He had fallen in love with her instantly.
Rolf put his hand on hers and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. She snuggled close. The thought arose within him that love and kindness might be more important than any score or any performance. He smiled. The old man would have skewered him alive for such a soggy thought.
Love—the word, the thought, the very notion—had never been in the crabby old man’s lexicon. Many times Geiger heard Rabinowitz speak of his passion for music, his enthrallment with his instrument, his dedication to the art of the piano.
But Rabinowitz had never spoken of love. Not in front of Geiger. Not even once.
Four
From the cemetery in upper Manhattan, the drive back to East Seventy-Third Street began in silence. Geiger watched the city go past him. The limousine cut through deteriorated sections of Morningside Heights, old neighborhoods that once were famous for kosher pickles, pastrami, and egg creams, but which now were marked by multicultural storefronts. Signs in Spanish, Hindi and Vietnamese announced the newest wave of merchants.
The driver came to a stoplight. Geiger studied a trio of men sitting on the steps of a crumbling tenement, drinking beer from quart bottles covered with paper bags.
Geiger’s eyes left the men and he stared off into the middle distance. In his mind, a montage of bitter, unhappy memories appeared; one long, lingering, aching recollection of an unhappy childhood in West Virginian coal country, fifteen miles west of the Pennsylvania border. Intellectually, an American Siberia.
He shuddered. He turned to Diana and began to tell her about the beauty of the Italian coastline around San Remo and how much he hoped she’d accompany him on his next trip.
But just as one note or counterpoint leads to another in a composition, one memory primed another. For Rolf, the past always caused a pain that was never far away.
He had endured a childhood of abuse and poverty. A home with plastic sheeting across the broken glass of his bedroom window, sheeting that failed miserably against the brutal winters of West Virginia. He could remember lying in bed at night and feeling the wind seeping through the walls. The winters had been like an enemy that always had one surrounded.
Rickety furniture. Sears, previously owned. Naked light bulbs. Heat from a failing coal stove. Threadbare carpets from Goodwill. Chipped paint throughout the house. Not enough food many nights. He was the only child, and for his first years he thought everyone lived like this.
Frank Geiger, his father, was a drunken, violence-prone man who worked in an anthracite coal mine when he worked at all. Half the time he drank his weekly paycheck. He had so opposed Rolf’s musical affinities that he had once taken a miner’s hammer and smashed his grandmother’s piano, the only object of worth the family owned.
“Pianos are for fairies. Music is for fairies. No son of mine grows up to be a fairy.”
Frank Geiger figured that if cracking coal was good enough for him, it was good enough for his kid. The boy had been an accident anyway.
So Rolf had played at Catholic school, the one his mother insisted he go to and for whom his mother’s parents paid. Dorothy, Rolf’s mother, was the Catholic in the family. Frank worshiped only beer.
The nuns thought Rolf had good musical instincts. Sister Mary William arranged some time each week with the school piano. There was no teacher, so Rolf figured it out by himself, with help from library books. The nuns also familiarized him with the great composers.
Dorothy Geiger was a plain, woman who walked with a limp and always carried a plastic rosary in her pocket. She might have been able to keep a job if her husband hadn’t beat her more times than anyone suspected, enough times to have caused the limp. She grew old with sinus damage which contributed to breathing problems which brought on respiratory problems which—along with too many packs of Marlboros and lousy health care—brought on sinusitis which would bring on a blood infection. Her death came at age forty-four. At least Rolf was grown by that time. Her son was the one thing that legitimized her life. Rolf sent her money, but by that time a mild form of derangement had set in, and she wouldn’t spend any of it.
Smashing things. That was always Rolf’s father’s solution to everything.
Once he had even given such instruction to his son.
At age eleven, Rolf was to change schools, going from a lower middle class district in Shenandoah City to a tougher, grittier blue-collar junior-senior high school in Wales Valley.
St. Agnes’ School. Parochial. Franciscan.
His father dropped him at the new schoolyard at six-fifty on the first morning.
“Find the biggest toughest kid in the schoolyard at recess,” Geiger told his son. “Then go up to him and punch him in his fat Irish face.”
“What?”
“Do it and everyone will leave you alone.”
“But…?” Geiger slapped his son.
“Do it or don’t come home.” Then he shoved Rolf out of the car. Rolf agonized. He stood on the empty asphalt of the playground. He waited. School started. Then recess. Eventually he saw a good-looking but rugged young man throwing a football. Rolf worked up his courage. Then he walked up to the young man and smacked him. A sucker punch from the left, hard and across the jaw. Just as his father had requested.
It loosened two of the recipient’s teeth and drew blood from a cut lip. It was quite a shot. The young man stared at him in shock. He didn’t retaliate. The recipient of the punch had been a young seminarian, Brother Matthew, just assigned to teach at St. Agnes’.
Rolf found himself sitting in the school’s front hall five minutes later. He was terrified, waiting for an audience with the school’s principal, Monsignor Kelly. He expected to be beaten in return, because that’s how it would have gone at home.
He finally had his audience. Monsignor Kelly listened. Rolf explained what he’d done. And why. The priest looked at him thoughtfully, then spoke.
“Go into the next room, young man, and think about your actions,” Kelly said. “There’s a lesson to be learned today.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rolf went into the next room, a small study. There was a piano. Geiger looked at it and stood near it, running his hands across the keyboard but afraid to sound a note. It had been a long time since he’d had access to an instrument.
A few minutes later, Brother Matthew came into the room. Rolf looked up quickly and abruptly pulled his hands away from the piano. Rolf was frightened. He looked at the young brother. Matthew smiled. They talked for several minutes. Then the brother picked up on the way Geiger’s eyes frequently slid sideways to the piano.
“You like music?” the brother asked. Geiger nodded.
“Can you play?” Matthew opened the keyboard.
“A little.”
“Do you have an instrument at home?”
“I used to.”
“What happened to it?” Geiger shrugged.
“It got broken.”
Matthew reached to the keyboard. With one strong white hand, he found the melod
y from a concerto by Mozart. It lasted fifteen seconds. “Can you do that?” Matthew asked.
Geiger looked at the keyboard. He hadn’t touched one in years. He set his hands haltingly to it and repeated the melody. The second time through, he added chords.
“Impressive,” said Brother Matthew. “And I think God would say that this is a much better use of your hands—creating something beautiful instead of perpetrating violence. Okay?”
In great relief, Rolf nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
“We’re friends?” Matthew asked. Rolf nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
They shook hands. Monsignor Kelly went to the Geiger home to discuss the incident. Frank Geiger came to the door. He didn’t like the look of the cassock. Profanely and drunkenly Frank Geiger took a swing at the priest. The school then understood what Rolf faced at home.
Sometimes in dark moments, Rolf Geiger thought back to the crushing oppression in which he had been raised. And when he did, he wondered whether his piano playing was some colossal act of fraud. Deep down he questioned if he was really as good as he thought he was.
Of course, he’d then pose the next question: one which defied a logical answer. He thought of Frank Geiger, who died at forty-seven with a sixteen-ounce can of Old Milwaukee in his hand, eight crumpled bucks in his pocket, and a bullet in his neck. A white-trash life and a white-trash death. So, the question: how in heaven’s name had Rolf’s mind and hands been touched with such genius? Where had it come from? And where, for that matter, was it leading?
Today the future and the past seemed to be concurrently on his mind. He shuddered when he thought of his childhood. The ten block walks to school in the winter in a coat that was threadbare and a pair of shoes with no insulation. Shirt and pants that were repaired beyond belief, that other children in the school ridiculed.
Time spiraled. As his limousine moved through upper Manhattan on the day of the Rabinowitz funeral, now passing Columbia University, his mind continued to drift.
Brother Matthew had been the first to show Rolf how this one black dot on the treble clef corresponded to C on the keyboard. The same dot, or note, on the bass clef corresponded to the E. Within a few minutes, Rolf could plunk a tune from the paper. The next time he sat down, he could pull a tune out of the air, then write it down with all the proper notation.
Eventually, Brother Matthew sent Rolf to see Stanley Kraus, who lived in the next town. Kraus was a man in his seventies, retired, gentle, with wise old-world eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, a kindly Yiddish version of Benjamin Franklin. He had built a career in Philadelphia, giving lessons and playing with The Philadelphia Orchestra.
“So? You’re going to play the piano for me?” Kraus inquired, settling into a chair by the side of a baby grand that consumed all of his living room. “Did you bring your sheet music?
“No.”
“Then how will you play?”
“From memory.”
The old man raised another eyebrow. He smiled indulgently, expecting little. “Then what will you play?” Kraus asked. “Do you have a favorite piece?”
“Fur Elise,” Geiger answered after a moment’s thought.
“Ah. Well, then. By all means, please play.”
Mr. Kraus settled into his Queen Anne chair. He closed his eyes and waited. Twelve-year-old Rolf Geiger sat down at the piano bench. He smiled sweetly. His fingers found the keyboard. Then, gently, he began.
A few measures and Kraus felt his pulse quicken. He looked at the intensity on the boy’s face, the knowing run of the fingers across the keys. There was a clearness, a precision, and a facility to Geiger’s playing which were beyond astonishing. It filled the room.
Goosebumps traveled up and down the teacher’s arms. Stanley Kraus was swept away by the feeling, the passion, and the immense talent. The raw talent, the genius, was prodigious. And no one seemed to have picked up on it yet.
Geiger came to the end of the piece. He turned to the old man.
“Was that all right?” Rolf Asked.
“Young man… Are you unaware of how good you are?” Geiger shrugged.
“I just like to play the piano,” Rolf said.
Kraus reached into a pile of music books that lay nearby in casual disarray.
“I would like you to try something else,” he said. He prowled through the books. “Have you played a lot of Beethoven? Moonlight Sonata, for example.” Kraus found the book. “I’d like you to play the last movement,” the teacher said. He opened some sheet music.
“I don’t need the books,” Geiger said. “I know the piece.”
The boy played. Again Kraus froze, barely moving until Geiger had finished. Eventually the boy looked up and saw the teacher staring at him.
“Was that good?” Geiger asked.
‘I expected ‘good’. What you demonstrated was in another realm.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Has anyone heard you play other than the priests and nuns in your hometown?”
“No, sir.” Kraus waited for a moment as he formed the next question.
“I want you to tell me something,” Kraus asked at length. “The piece you just played was not a child’s piece. I want to know: how do you grasp so thoroughly the poetry and passion of Beethoven? How is it possible in one so young?”
“The music speaks to me, sir. It communicates.”
“What does it say?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. But I feel something in it.” Kraus thought for a moment.
“But how do you know how to interpret a certain piece?”
“It’s clear to me, sir. It’s obvious.”
“But if no one has showed you? Or if you have never heard it before?”
“It’s still obvious, sir. When I start to play, I begin to understand what I think the composer felt. So I go with it.”
Kraus settled back. He looked down for a moment and seemed to be thinking. Then he raised his eyes, having arrived at a decision.
“I’m going to telephone a friend who is a conductor in New York City,” Kraus said softly. “He will need to hear you play also.”
Geiger felt confused, almost as if he had done something wrong. Mr. Kraus seemed like a kind, intelligent man. Why couldn’t he stay here? Why must he be again passed along?
“You should be taught by one of the current masters,” Kraus said. “A Rubinstein. Or a Horowitz. Or a Rabinowitz. Have you heard of them?”
“I think I heard their names a little.”
“Have you heard their recordings?”
Geiger shook his head.
“I will find you some CD’s. This will be my gift to you. Rubinstein, Horowitz, and Rabinowitz were the greatest pianists of the last half of the twentieth century,” Kraus explained. “Rabinowitz is the last one alive. He must instruct you. You will have to go to New York.”
“Oh.” Geiger thought about it. “Does he give lessons?” The teacher laughed.
“In your case, he will be unable to resist.”
Stanley Kraus was right. But it took almost eighteen months to move Geiger to the proper audience. During this time, Rolf’s academic studies at St. Agnes’ were accelerated.
Geiger went to New York. The Julliard School prepared a special program for him. The word ‘prodigy’ was used for the first time. A few notes appeared about him in newspapers that covered the classical music world.
Eventually, he found an audience with Isador Rabinowitz in a rehearsal chamber at Carnegie Hall on a sultry August afternoon. Rabinowitz was stunned at what he heard on his first meeting with the young man. Even more astonishing was that at age fourteen, Geiger remained self-taught, unspoiled by the techniques and philosophies of others.
On their first meeting, Rabinowitz listened to Rolf play ten different pieces, five of them new. Toward the end of the visit, Rabinowitz presented Geiger with a pair of fantasias he had never seen before—both by the difficult Sigismund Thalberg. One featured a cantabile section with
rugged right hand arpeggios and left hand octaves. The other was marked by Thalberg’s usual lack of harmonic imagination, and was exceedingly obtuse, with a section of leggierissimo octaves that passed from the left hand to the right, while its theme still rang in the tenor range.
Giving the piece to a young pianist was the musical equivalent of a bear trap. It had been written for a mature virtuoso for the sake of showing off his virtuosity.
Geiger played flawlessly and with the skill that Thalberg had demanded, filling the rehearsal space with an explosively brilliant rendition. Rabinowitz sat silently as the final notes resounded. The boy turned toward him and waited.
“Any good?” the boy finally asked. After another moment, almost grudgingly, Rabinowitz answered.
“Yes. It was considerably skilled. Highly competent,” Rabinowitz said calmly. The maestro pondered for a longer moment, then replied in his never-quite-perfect English.
“But you have much for to be learned. For example, you hold yourself the fingers rather too high. You must hold them closer to the keys, in especially the legato passages. You will that way make the music more completely finished, with a rounder and more ringing tone.”
“Oh.” The boy shrugged, deciphering the man’s strange accent. “All right.”
“More than ‘all right,’” snapped Rabinowitz. “This you will do!”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” Geiger answered. Obediently, Rolf placed both his hands above the keyboard again, measuring the new placement with his eyes. Then he dropped his fingertips an eighth of an inch. The gesture would have been imperceptible to most observers.
“Yes! There! Better! No farther!” Rabinowitz snapped.
Rolf smiled and turned to the maestro, expecting at least a smile of approval. None came.
Rabinowitz’s eyes were already lowered. The old man was carefully studying the unusual academic resume that Rolf had brought with him. Two remote parochial schools. Lessons from the nuns. Acceptance to Julliard. Rabinowitz turned back to Rolf with a cold, calculating eye.
The old man then spent twenty minutes describing the indignities and persecutions he had suffered as a Jew in Europe, frequently with a wink from the local Catholic clergy in Poland, Hungary and Russia, he said. All this through the briar patch of Rabinowitz’s English, which was always laden with false stops, strange words and consonants. Much to the boy’s shock, the maestro’s English was strewn with obscenities and blasphemies, bitten off sharply like an angry owner of a delicatessen.