Stephanie, now in middle school, just smirks. She is preoccupied with a new group of friends who sometimes come by the house when my dad isn’t there. They smell like smoke and look at you with narrowed eyes. They wear dark clothes and thick black eye makeup. Steph’s best friend scares me the most. She is long and lanky and has an evil look about her. I’m sure Steph is telling her friends things about me that aren’t true.
After my dad leaves the house in the morning, Steph changes into pants he thinks are too tight and lines her eyes with kohl. When I collect her laundry, sorting through her piles of black clothes, I find unsettling clues about the life she is no longer sharing with me. I uncrumple the scraps of notebook paper that I find balled up in her pockets and read the scrawled notes that she and her friends have been passing back and forth to each other in class.
“I hate everything.”
“My life sucks.”
“Homework is a joke.”
“I’m SO bored.”
“My parents are assholes.”
“I have to get out of here.”
It’s confusing; I don’t know what to do. When my mother was in the house, Steph and I were aligned, a unit, each other’s greatest defender. But since my mom has been in the hospital, I’ve had to act as Steph’s caretaker instead. I can’t be her ally anymore. She’s my responsibility now. The strain between us is unbearable, and we fight more than ever. Most of what Steph is up to is uncharted territory for me anyway; I don’t have the benefit of having “been there, done that.” I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing to help her.
If I tell my dad, he’ll just get mad. I don’t want to worry my mom, whose condition is aggravated by stress. Nor do I want to make Steph mad at me.
But I can’t just let it go.
One night after dinner, I bring up the subject after my dad goes downstairs to his studio.
“Uh, Steph? I was thinking. What ever happened to Chrissie and Arlene? And Liz? They were so nice, nicer than your friends are now…” I trail off.
“What’s wrong with my friends?”
“I don’t know. They’re a little scary. Tough. Smoky.”
“They’re my friends. They care about me!”
I back off. “Sure, I know. I just wondered, you know, about the other girls?”
“They’re dorks!” she announces, leaving the room.
Steph’s grades start to slide as she falls in with the girls who smoke cigarettes in the field behind the school and cut class. At first it’s easy for her to keep my dad from seeing the warning notes that come in the mail. She simply throws them out before he gets home. It’s trickier to keep her report cards a secret, but she’s able to fool my dad by painstakingly changing the D’s to B’s, or F’s to A’s.
One day I see her report card lying on the table. As I pick it up she grabs it from my hands.
“What are you doing? That’s mine.”
“I know, I just wanted to see. What did you get?”
“Well, if you must know, I got a bunch of B’s, and one C. And one D.”
I inhale sharply. A D! “What did Daddy say? Did you tell him yet?”
“No, and I’m not going to. I can bring it up next quarter.”
“But he has to sign your report card! He’ll see it!”
“No, he won’t. Look.” She has neatly forged his name in the space provided. It doesn’t really look like his writing, but I have to admit I’m a little impressed by how bold Steph is. I say nothing to my dad and hope for the best.
Of course Stephanie and I are both kidding ourselves. My father is a teacher, and one who knows every other teacher in the entire school system. He practically explodes when he finds out what is going on.
“Stephanie! You are failing math! How eez this possible? What the hell eez going on?” He is yelling so hard his face turns purple, and I’m afraid he’ll give himself a stroke.
My dad can’t figure out why any daughter of his would squander the chance to get an education. To him, nothing is more important. He’s saved every one of his own report cards, even the ones from when he was a boy in Ukraine during the war. His framed diplomas hang on the walls of his studio.
Steph is grounded.
“It’s not fair!” she cries when I sit down with her that night to go over her homework.
Dad stomps angrily down the steps after dinner to teach, leaving me with my sullen sister, her teary face smeared with eyeliner that she isn’t supposed to be wearing in the first place. I’m the enforcer now.
Though Steph doesn’t confide in me anymore, I can hear her thoughts when she practices the violin. Longing, sadness, anger, melancholy, all of them come through in the strains of her playing. Our vicious old great-aunt Titka, who scares me almost as much as her sister, Baba, is right when she remarks: “You, Malanka, play with energy. But Stephka—she plays with heart.”
Sometimes I see glimpses of the sweet, funny little girl behind the eyeliner. But those flashes appear less and less frequently. In eighth grade, Steph develops a cough and hoarseness that will not go away. My dad is worried. “Thees eez what comes from not eating your vegetables!” he says, insisting she eat more greens. Every time she leaves the house, he calls after her: “Bundle up!”
Only after he discovers a hole in the window screen of the downstairs bathroom and a little pile of cigarette butts underneath does he realize the reason for her cough. His feet come pounding up the stairs and down the hallway to her room, and another round of screaming, ranting, and threatening ensues. He’s running out of weapons, of things to take away. She is already grounded and forbidden to use the phone. At his wit’s end, Daddy extends her sentence. She’s now grounded indefinitely. But none of the punishments seem to make any difference to Stephanie.
11
“Mr. Jerry”
JOANNE
“E-flat scale.”
Without so much as a hello, Mr. K began my lesson. He sat at his piano, arms folded, a pencil protruding from one balled-up fist, staring at me as I dug into the strings. Upstairs, the after-dinner dishes were clattering as Melanie cleared the table. In the waiting room, my mother was flipping through a magazine. Mr. K didn’t seem to be aware of any outside disturbances. He didn’t believe in small talk during lessons. He never asked how my day was, or if I liked school, or what was my favorite subject. He never asked me anything at all. He just gave orders.
“Flat!”
He sprang forward in his chair to bang the off ending note on his piano.
I adjusted my fingers and tried again.
“Smooth wrist! Again!”
The formality of lessons always made me uncomfortable. I would walk in and hand Mr. K the seven dollars my parents had counted out carefully beforehand. He would stuff it into his pocket without looking at it, as if it were something vaguely distasteful. Then without another word he would begin.
First, he would drill me on scales. He almost always picked the hardest ones, where your fingers had to climb awkwardly all the way up the neck of the viola. When I hit a sour note, he banged the right one on the piano with a single finger, with such force the whole room seemed to shake. Sometimes he would make me just bow on open strings, back and forth and back and forth, teaching me to fluidly move my wrist so there was none of that painful crunching or croaking at the beginning or end of each note.
“More! Again.”
We were interrupted by a knock on the door.
Stephanie peeked into the room and tentatively walked in, handing her father her math homework. I tried to catch her eye. In our quartet, Steph was my kindred spirit: she loved to write stories like I did, and had a wild imagination, and always made me laugh. While Melanie was serious and obedient, Stephanie did a wickedly funny imitation of her dad and cracked herself up with her own jokes. We shared a tomboyish streak and a love of rock and roll. At orchestra parties, we compared our favorite musicians—I knew she was currently swooning over Peter Frampton—and she got headphones so her dad wouldn’t know sh
e was listening to Bruce Springsteen instead of Bach.
She could always make her father laugh, and she would smother him with kisses without embarrassment. When she was a little girl and got too rambunctious, he would gently swat her away. But lately, the dynamic had changed. He seemed to start yelling at her before she had a chance to do anything wrong. She was sullen more often than not, and she cried more easily than ever.
Now, I waited in awkward silence while he looked over the division and multiplication problems she had worked out in pencil on a mimeographed homework sheet. Her brown hair was askew, as if she had been pulling on it while working through the calculations. She watched him concentrate on her homework, absolutely still, not meeting my eyes.
Feeling like I was intruding on a private moment, I shifted from foot to foot and averted my gaze. I busied myself by studying one of the framed photographs on a bookshelf.
There were lots of photos in the studio. Most of them were in black and white and offered a glimpse of Mr. K in younger days. One on top of the piano showed a young man in an army uniform playing the cello. A while back when I played out of tune, Mr. K banged out the proper note on the piano so furiously that the whole instrument shook and the picture fell to the floor with a crash. Mr. K picked it up and, as he was brushing it off, told me it was taken when he played with a U.S. Army string quartet in Korea.
In another of his photos he is also wearing a uniform. This one is white and double-breasted, with shiny buttons and a sharp black stripe along the collar and cuffs. In this photo, though, he is laughing. He is surrounded by a group of children, who are also wearing uniforms. On his head is a paper crown.
The picture is a glimpse of a young man who didn’t yet know his future held a sick wife and crushing medical bills and rebellious teenage girls. It was taken in rural Shawneetown, Illinois, hard by the Kentucky border. I learned later that Mr. K got his first job there as a marching band director in 1954—right out of college and the Korean War—and that he helped desegregate its schools.
There wasn’t much to Shawneetown back when he arrived. Families had lived there for generations. The foreigner who barely spoke English must have been an odd sight, wandering through a town whose roots dated back to 1800, almost two decades before Illinois even became a state. The area was so rural that neighboring hamlets got by with one-room schoolhouses. But Shawneetown had two schools for white kids, and “Mr. Jerry,” as he was known there, was hired as band director for both.
Almost immediately, though, he started teaching students in the “Negro school” in town, too. The same impulse that always drew him toward the underdog, that stirred his passion for music celebrating freedom and rebellion against oppression, animated him there as well. “Naturally there were more objections,” he would remember later, “but I remained adamant, explaining that they were necessary for the band.”
He strong-armed almost every family in town to get their kids to start playing instruments; he needed all the recruits he could get. Within a couple of years, he had assembled a marching band sixty-one members strong, piling them into yellow school buses to perform and compete all over the county. He rehearsed them endlessly and trotted them out shamelessly. Broadway’s The Music Man wouldn’t open for a couple more years, but he was already a real-life Harold Hill, coaxing tunes out of his ragged crew through raw willpower, his own particular “think system.” Soon they were winning competitions all over the state.
After one particularly sweet victory, in the nearby town of Metropolis, band members poured into the center of town, buying up streamers and crepe paper to decorate their two buses. They were greeted at the Shawneetown border by a fire truck and police escort, sirens wailing, kicking off a town-wide celebration. “The students obviously love and admire him very much and their respect and admiration is mutual,” reported the Metropolis Sun-Sentinel. The Paducah Sun-Democrat celebrated the win with the headline: “Shawneetown Director Is Hero of Metropolis Fest.”
Mr. K found a friend in a farmer named Cedric Drone, who taught him to hunt raccoons and squirrels that they skinned and ate. When the nearby Ohio River flooded, they clambered onto Cedric’s boat to hunt ducks with shotguns. Mr. K never missed one of the Drones’ coon barbecue suppers, where they grilled raccoons they had hunted themselves.
The two men even owned a coon dog together, keeping K-D (its name a combination of their surname initials) at Cedric’s farm. When they took the dog hunting in the woods, they’d outfit themselves in old mining hard hats with gas-powered lights on them, borrowed from an elderly coal miner and moonshine runner who lived nearby. When someone stole the dog, they went to court to lay their claim; the case made the local front page, with a photo of the hound in front of the jury box. “ ‘Every Dog Has His Day,’ it has been said; but not every dog has his day in court as did the above pictured hunting dog,” the paper reported.
Cedric would invite him to his farmhouse for dinner, and Mr. K would join him for a smoke, puffing on a pipe that he filled with cherry-flavored tobacco so pungent it would make your eyes water. “You could be a mile away and know he was at our house, it just reeked,” Cedric’s son, Walter, told me years later. Mr. K would stay to watch wrestling matches on the black-and-white TV, “getting so excited he’d start jumping up and down and throwing punches. He finally broke the springs in the chair. He was totally entertaining. We just used to laugh our tails off.”
I was caught up in the photo, looking at the crisp military band uniforms and shiny snare drums, when a loud bang jolted me out of my reverie.
It was Steph, who had run out of the room after grabbing the homework sheet back from her father, slamming the door behind her. The sound reverberated in the silence of the studio. I stared at the back of the door, its paint faded and scuffed, still shuddering in its frame.
“I hate you!” I could hear her crying.
“Mr. Jerry” with his marching band at his first job in Shawneetown, Illinois. “King is Crowned,” says the caption, in the Paducah Sun-Democrat, April 14, 1957, reporting on a band competition victory.
I had grown accustomed to Steph’s sobbing, but this was new. Mr. K was the one who was supposed to be angry, and Stephanie was the one who was supposed to take it. I waited for him to tear out of his chair. I figured he’d be out the door in a split second, running after her and screaming for her to get her keester back here. This instant.
Instead, Mr. K turned back to me. His face was immobile. He said nothing. Then, with one finger, he began banging out a note on the piano. “E flat E flat E flat E flat,” he sang to the pitch.
“Again,” he said.
As I started my scale one more time, I could hear him sigh.
The end of junior high couldn’t come soon enough. I was a triple threat of thick glasses, bad hair, and good grades. Compounding the indignity, I had just gotten braces on when everybody else was getting theirs off, at a time when the other girls at school were already starting to get their Sweet Sixteen nose jobs.
Salvation came from an unexpected quarter.
“Good news,” Mr. K said when I showed up for my lesson one Tuesday evening. As usual, he was sitting at the piano in his cramped studio, a ratty wool cardigan sweater pulled over that day’s dress shirt and suit pants, a cup of tea in its china saucer in one hand.
“I haf spoken to Paul Doktor, and he weel take you as a private student.”
Paul Doktor, world-famous violist, whose penciled autograph was carefully preserved between plastic sheets in the green photo album in my bedroom?
“Really? He really said so?!” I didn’t even bother to cover my huge metallic grin with my hand.
“I haf taught you as much as I can,” Mr. K said solemnly, setting down his teacup and turning from his piano to face me. “Eet eez time for you to move on.”
I was too excited to notice the hint of melancholy in his voice.
I suppose I should have felt a twinge of regret about leaving my teacher. I had spent almost half my life being t
utored by him. Listening to him, being pushed and prodded by him, coming weekly to his studio. Could I even imagine what it would be like to suddenly stop? Could I imagine what it would be like not to spend each Tuesday night at a private lesson before quartet rehearsal? Looking back, I feel a pang of guilt for taking and taking all he had to offer, and then running off to the fancier teacher the moment I had the opportunity.
I’d like to think all those thoughts flooded through my brain right then. But that wouldn’t be honest. I was too excited about Paul Doktor to think about Mr. K at all.
Nor did I appreciate the novelty of the situation: the best teachers usually don’t send their best students elsewhere. And Paul Doktor wasn’t just any teacher. He was one of the great violists of the century. Like Mr. K, he had come to the United States after the war, but unlike Mr. K, he was born into music royalty. The son of a renowned Viennese violinist, Mr. Doktor was courtly and impeccably mannered, with an elegant Austrian accent and a gracious air that evoked the salons of Vienna and the opera houses of Europe. When he wasn’t gracing a stage somewhere, he was teaching at Juilliard and the Mannes College of Music in Manhattan. Mr. K had met him through musician friends and convinced him to spend a week each August giving master classes to the sweaty adolescents at his ASTA conference.
“Thank you thank you thank you!” I spun around, giddy. I couldn’t believe my good fortune, and I was unexpectedly flooded with gratitude for the man who made it happen. Forgetting for a moment how much Mr. K intimidated me, I threw my arms around him.
For the first time, I realized with surprise that my larger-than-life teacher was shorter than me.
My viola lessons with Paul Doktor brought an unexpected benefit. Every other Saturday, my parents drove up the New Jersey Turnpike and through the Lincoln Tunnel to take me to his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We would emerge from the tunnel promptly at eleven A.M., and I would see the same over-the-hill prostitute on the corner of West Forty-Second Street, in hot pants and high heels, with long bottle-blond hair that you could just tell was covering up her natural gray. For some reason, the senior citizen hooker always made me teary, as did the stooped old ladies in black making their way slowly along the sidewalk, gripping a cane in one hand and a half-empty plastic bag of cereal and cat food in the other. The shuffling old women reminded me of the patients I visited in the hospital with Mr. K. I wished I could hop out of the car to talk with them.
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