Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  At home, cut off from the other moms and the suburban strip malls where everybody else congregates and does their shopping, my mother becomes a connoisseur of every service that delivers, mails, or shows up at your door. Dittman’s Food and Meat Market brings groceries, and Schwartz Taub Pharmacy delivers medicines and toiletries. The Sears catalog supplies us with clothing, and my father is left to handle all the bills.

  “We’re going to lose the house!” he yells at her one night.

  How do you lose a house? I wonder. Who is going to take it? The Communists? I imagine being forced to leave my pink bedroom, being marched outside by the angry men in red uniforms, and having to live outside, not just in summer but in the rain and snow and cold.

  I will grow up believing my father’s dire predictions that at any moment our house can be taken away. Of course, the money issues are tangible, which makes them easier to argue about. The underlying fear and desperation about my mother’s health and the uncertainty of our own future are too terrible to speak aloud.

  No matter how difficult their days are, the one thing my parents always agree on is music. I practice seven days a week, with no days off ever.

  My progress is quick. Once Daddy closes the door to his studio and we get to work, all the other distractions—the unpalatable dinners, my mom’s frustrations—melt away. I quickly make my way through the beginner books. Daddy pastes star stickers on the pieces I master, or writes the word AGAIN in angry red capital letters when my efforts fall short. He signs and dates the last page of each lesson book I complete, then pulls out a fresh, crisp new book for us to start.

  One night, Daddy hands me a new piece of music: Bach’s Concerto in A Minor. I am excited; this is a real concerto, just as the German composer wrote it in 1748, and the first piece Daddy has ever given me that isn’t simplified for students. I have been listening to the big kids play it all of my life. I can hear in my head exactly what it should sound like. Tentatively, I start to play. It doesn’t sound quite right, not at all like when my dad’s best students do it.

  “Sharp!” Daddy yells, insistently banging the off ending note on the piano over and over again.

  I try again. “Now you’re flat!” More banging the note on the piano. “Make sure hand eez een position before you start to play!”

  I gulp in a breath, hold it, and dig into the strings again. This time the notes are right, but the sound is tinny and small. It is never easy to get a big sound out of the tiny violin I am playing, but still, the sound doesn’t match the music I hear so clearly in my imagination.

  “Lift you bow up een the air after first note and again after second note. Let the sound ring!” Dad is talking louder and faster now.

  I try one more time, this time while attacking the strings with my bow just as my father showed me. Success! This is a new feeling: the first time I realize I can pluck a sound from inside my head and make it real with my violin. With astonishment I plunge ahead, from one phrase of the piece to the next. And the next. And…

  … I stumble.

  I stop, lowering my violin and tentatively stealing a glance at my dad.

  “That’s eet!” he is yelling, his head bobbing up and down. “Not bad!”

  I would have hugged him, but Daddy always says there is a time and place for everything. Lessons are strictly business. Hugs will come afterward.

  My father turns back to his piano. That’s where he always sits, for hours every night, in the dress shirt and tie he wore to work that day with an old cardigan sweater thrown over it. His brow is furrowed again with concentration. With a single finger, he begins jabbing at a note I hadn’t gotten quite right, banging out the tone over and over and over, as loud as he can play it. The whole piano shakes with the force of his one finger. Then he turns back to me.

  “Again,” my father says.

  3

  The Students

  JOANNE

  In our green-shingled house, in our neighborhood of identical Colonials and split-levels so new that the saplings in the yards provided no shade, the piano had pride of place in the living room. The instrument’s upholstered bench was never empty, always occupied by one of my older sisters. The rest of the room was strictly off-limits. With its tailored couch and floor-length drapes, the room was immaculate, never a knickknack out of place, and nobody ever sat in there except on holidays. Nonetheless, my mom vacuumed the sofa cushions, moved the overstuffed armchair to clean underneath it, and dusted the sideboards in that room every Wednesday morning.

  This is the room where I realized that I had no talent.

  Both of my sisters were becoming accomplished musicians. Michele, having graduated from Mr. K’s beginner orchestra, was progressing rapidly on the violin, while Ronni would soon take up the flute. Both took piano lessons. At any hour of the day, somebody was playing an instrument somewhere, and often two different melodies would be coming at you in uncoordinated stereo. The two of them were always singing together, too, harmonizing during car rides in the big maroon Oldsmobile and telling me to shut up if I tried to join in.

  My dad, an energetic amateur photographer, was there to capture it all on film. One sister would happily take her place at the piano bench, while the other would pose with her instrument. And I… I had nothing. “Try holding up your arms like you’re a ballerina,” my father would coach me helpfully when he photographed the three of us grouped around the piano, so there would be some display of artistry demonstrated by the apparently ability-free little sister. Except I didn’t take ballet, and my attempts at dance usually ended with me banging into a wall.

  “I want to play an instrument, too,” I announced one day, as my dad, having rearranged our photographic tableau around the piano yet again, stepped back and fiddled with the camera viewfinder.

  “You’re too young,” my mom yelled back from the kitchen.

  I tugged at my jumper, an uncomfortable concoction of stiff embroidered cotton with a matching white blouse and scratchy elastic cuffs that left indentations on my arms.

  “Why can’t I take piano lessons?” I ventured again.

  “Because I said so.” From the kitchen again.

  Of course no is a familiar word to any youngest child. As in, “No new clothes—your sisters’ hand-me-downs are perfectly fine.” And “No long hair like your sisters—your pixie cut will do”—that would be the sheared-sheep look that compelled strangers to pat me on the head and call me a sweet little boy. “No music lessons” was just another indignity to add to the list.

  The truth is, I was always a half step behind my chatty, quick-witted sisters. When I was three, my mother had attempted to enroll me in a nursery school run by the home economics class at East Brunswick High School. I cried so hard that the teachers gave up and sent me home, to the great glee of my sisters who would forever taunt me for flunking out of preschool. After that, my teachers kept telling my parents that I was far too timid. I never fought back, they told my parents with concern, even when the girl I considered my best friend nicknamed me “Dodo,” as in the television cartoon Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space.

  I didn’t mind the teasing. My parents always figured me for the easygoing one: with two precocious older daughters, they were happy to have the littlest one be good-natured, if not terribly bright. Anyway, even if I had tried to protest, chances are nobody would have noticed.

  The piano in our living room had been my dad’s idea. Not that he knew how to play it. He was born in Oakland, California, in 1931 to a Romanian immigrant mother and a father who grew up as an orphan, shuttled from one impoverished relative to another. His parents named him Burton but called him Boots, to rhyme with his older brother Sydney’s nickname, Scoots. When Dad was a toddler, my grandmother was hauled in by the Oakland police because he bore such a strong resemblance to the missing Lindbergh baby, the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s kidnapped son who would soon turn up murdered. My grandmother had to produce her son’s birth certificate before the cops let her go, prompting a local ne
wspaper to print side-by-side photos of the two toddlers above the headline “Lindbergh Baby’s Double Gives His Family Trouble.”

  Money was always tight on my grandfather’s wages as a traveling X-ray technician. The family moved frequently, hopscotching across the country to St. Louis and Brooklyn before landing in Queens, New York, where Boots entered his fifth elementary school in five years. He slept in the galley kitchen of the family’s one-bedroom apartment, cramming his lanky frame—he grew to be six feet three inches—into a narrow bed. When he joined the Boy Scouts, he was humiliated by having to wear his much older brother’s outdated Scout knickers years after the uniform switched to long pants. To help make ends meet, he went to work starting at age nine, first selling Liberty magazine subscriptions, then the Saturday Evening Post, then running errands for a butcher and delivering laundry for a dry cleaner during World War II, when there was a steel shortage and he had to wait by the door for customers to return their metal clothes hangers.

  My father was what they euphemistically called a “slow starter”—he was held back a year and sat in the back row cracking jokes until an astute teacher figured out the problem was he had such horrendous eyesight that he couldn’t see the blackboard. By the time he hit high school he had become a standout student. At a Boy Scout party one night, he met my mother. She had dark brown hair, flirtatious dark eyes, and long black eyelashes, and she attended the same gifted high school program that he did. She was fourteen years old. He was smitten.

  He courted her through high school and while working his way through Columbia University, commuting from home by subway three hours a day to save money and working in the university’s atomic physics laboratory, helping tend to the atom-splitting cyclotron in the basement of Pupin Hall. During the summers, he popped salt pills to keep from getting dehydrated while packing boxes in a Garment District sweatshop, earning enough money to buy a diamond engagement ring. “I married your father because he was the only man I could find who was smarter than me,” my mother would say.

  My father’s interest in music grew out of a peculiar hobby: the theremin, a strange electronic instrument that was the forerunner of the synthesizer. He had learned to play the theremin from my grandfather, an inveterate electronic tinkerer who built several of them from scratch, assembling them inside empty wooden radio cabinets out of spare radio parts and glass tubes. The instrument made a satisfyingly eerie whine, and my grandfather had earned a few extra bucks creating sound effects for television sound tracks. He even made a 1962 appearance on the TV game show I’ve Got a Secret, a surprisingly dapper figure who stumped panelists Bill Cullen and Henry Morgan with his mystery contraption before performing his rendition of the Rodgers and Hart classic “Lover.” Such was my father’s sentimental attachment to it that it was the only possession he brought with him to my parents’ marriage. But my father always regretted that he couldn’t read music and was resentful that his parents refused him a proper music education.

  Dad was determined to provide for his kids what his own parents had not. So after my mother’s parents threw them a properly extravagant Manhattan wedding in the penthouse of the St. Moritz hotel overlooking Central Park, they moved to the burgeoning suburbs of New Jersey, where he began his management trainee job. He had been working his way up the corporate ladder since then. By the time the third girl in five years was born (they were so sure I would finally be a boy that they had already picked out the name “Jeff”), they had moved from their little garden apartment behind the Korvettes department store into our four-bedroom house in a new subdivision.

  On weekends, my dad would take the three of us girls on “nature walks” through the backyard or on field trips to nearby farms. He ordered science kits from the Edmund Scientific catalog that arrived each month and that we would put together in our fluorescentlit basement, delighting in the whiff of danger surrounding our experiments with magnets and iron filings and chemistry sets and telescope lenses.

  My dad was the one who insisted that my parents buy the piano that now stood in our living room. He had hoped to take lessons himself. But once my sisters got their hands on it, he never had a chance.

  My mother took it from there. She was the one who made sure we found our way to Mr. K. She didn’t have much use for the piano herself. I never saw her so much as touch it, other than to dust it. As the only child of a prosperous ladies’ clothing store owner, she had grown up in an attached house in the shadow of the old Forest Hills Tennis Stadium and Clubhouse that hosted the U.S. Open tennis tournament each year, though she never went because Jews weren’t allowed to join. Her parents, striving first-generation Americans whose families had escaped Czarist Russia, had insisted that she take six full years of piano lessons, during which she learned only that she was tone-deaf. Her singing voice was so god-awful that as a toddler Michele, who had an excellent ear, faithfully learned to sing off-key.

  But Mom did know that anyone who showed any musical talent in East Brunswick studied with Mr. K. And she was determined that her daughters would, too.

  Mr. K’s reputation preceded him. His arrival in East Brunswick had coincided with my parents’ own. Not long after he started, he made headlines for creating a school orchestra, a rarity in a town better known for its 4-H livestock exhibitions at the county fair held each August down on Fern Road.

  There hadn’t been enough musicians at first, not enough even to field a baseball team, much less an orchestra. To make sure they showed up, on concert days he tooled around in his big white Pontiac, collecting students along the way. His car was a familiar sight in the older section of town, where the homes were a little bit smaller and the driveways were empty. Passing the Colonial Diner and Two Guys on Route 18, Mr. K would turn off the highway and go house to house, honking, as screen doors banged open and students with instrument cases came flying across the lawns. When he’d gotten everyone, sometimes he’d stop off at his house and treat the whole lot of them to dinner with his own kids. Mostly, the students just toyed with the glutinous red borscht that, disconcertingly, always seemed to be on the menu.

  He invited the best of them to study privately with him on school nights in his basement studio, where he sat on a piano bench with his tie unknotted and a ratty cardigan sweater thrown over his dress shirt, banging out notes on the keyboard.

  His music program attracted a lot of attention—even more so after the concert where we watched his daughter Melanie play a solo. The newspaper that landed on our driveway every morning sometimes ran photographs of him with his daughter and her violin. I was intrigued by the little girl my age whom I’d never met and never heard speak, but who I had watched perform on the stage.

  One of those articles showed a photograph of Mr. K with “Little Melanie, aged 5,” and “already a gifted young violinist,” as he helped her practice. The article said Mr. K had made East Brunswick into “a hot-house for young string players,” and that more of his students were accepted into New Jersey’s competitive student orchestras—All-County, All-Region, All-State—than any other town in the state. The article was headlined “Mr. Music” and it said Mr. K was called “the Santa Claus of Strings.”

  I didn’t think Mr. K looked at all like Santa Claus. I had never heard the older kids call him that, either. I heard them call him other names—none that my parents would allow me to repeat—but Santa Claus was not among them. I thought, instead, he looked like one of the bad guys in the movie The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! My parents had taken us to see it in a double feature with Bambi at the Turnpike Drive-In Theater out on Route 18, where I was allowed to play on the swings in my pajamas and fall asleep in the back of our station wagon.

  Sometimes the newspapers printed the pictures of Mr. K’s conquering students, posing with their unblinking, unsmiling teacher in his dark suit and severe little mustache. He looked old to me—maybe even thirty—and when you peered at his face, an involuntary “Yes, sir” just popped right out of your mouth. Some of the student
s were shown mid-performance, their violins held high. Each one had the same ramrod straight posture, the left wrist held back smoothly, the right bow arm precisely angled, and the right wrist moving so fluidly that the bow seemed to glide back and forth like nature intended it that way.

  You could see that my sister Michele, after playing for barely more than a year, already had the same elegant form. Her straight posture and firm wrist made her look just like the kids in the newspaper pictures with Mr. K. Someday Michele hoped she could get private lessons with him, too, not just the group lessons offered for free at school. My mom had already asked, but there was a year-long waiting list for a spot on his roster. And besides, he seemed unusually preoccupied these days.

  I, meanwhile, was resigned to pretending to be a ballerina.

  “Why can’t I play an instrument?” I asked my dad once again, as I lifted up my arms clumsily in a thoroughly unconvincing port de bras.

  “Have patience,” he said, smiling. “Maybe next year.”

  Left to right: Joanne, Ronni, and Michele Lipman at ages five, eight, and ten. Their dad, Burton Lipman, an avid photographer, was behind the camera.

  MELANIE

  “Get your keesters into the car!” Daddy yells at Steph and me. He is often impatient these days. I grab Stephanie by the hand, pulling her away from the half-eaten ham sandwich on her plate. Down the steps toward the garage we go, with a quick stop so I can pull an old towel from the linen closet in case she gets carsick.

  On weekends like this one, my parents go hunting for a cure for my mom. They have found a doctor, hours away in Delaware, with an experimental treatment they hope will make her better, or at least prevent her from getting worse.