Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  John Williams? Star Wars’ John Williams? Check my schedule? What, is he kidding?

  The Boston Symphony Orchestra combines with the Tanglewood student orchestra for a concert. Conductor John Williams, the composer of film scores, including those for Star Wars and Schindler’s List, congratulates Melanie. Also pictured, from left to right, BSO concertmaster Malcolm Lowe, violinist Craig Reiss, principal second violinist Marylou Speaker Churchill, and violinist Rachel Goldstein, far right.

  “Yes!” I say.

  “The season starts in early June and runs through August.”

  Damn. Early June?

  “Um, is it possible to miss just one weekend? I have something planned for June twentieth.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m sorry. It’s the whole summer, all or nothing.”

  I only hesitate for an instant.

  “Yes! I’ll do it!”

  Now I just need to tell Ed that we’ll have to reschedule our wedding.

  The life of a musician is a series of auditions. After touring with the Boston Pops and exhausting my savings flying around the country to audition for other big-city orchestras, I land a one-year contract with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Ed and I, newly married after our hastily rescheduled wedding, pack up the battered Toyota Tercel that looks like a toaster oven on wheels and move to Pittsburgh.

  Our wedding had been a cheerfully no-frills gathering at a local restaurant that we paid for ourselves. My ever-practical father had offered me a choice: he would buy me a violin or pay for the wedding. I didn’t have to think twice. My mother came, and Steph pulled out her violin to serenade us with Bach’s Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3. Baba scowled through the ceremony and boycotted the reception, furious that I didn’t get married in her Ukrainian church. My great-aunt Titka mocked my dress and makeup, then announced that her wedding gift was to buy a new dishwasher for my father. It didn’t matter. Ed just laughed and said that anything nice anyone did for my father meant more to him than any gift to us ever could.

  That spring, the Pittsburgh Symphony, under conductor Lorin Maazel, is to perform in New York City at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, one of the great concert halls in America. It’s a thrill to be playing there on tour with a major orchestra for the very first time. Before the concert, we file onstage to warm up.

  “What’s that?” my stand partner says, squinting into the crowd.

  He’s pointing to the balcony. I look up from the music for Strauss’s Don Quixote, which we will be performing in a few minutes. Leaning over the edge of the balcony railing, a man is frantically waving a large white handkerchief.

  “Look at that guy!” my stand partner laughs.

  Stephanie plays Bach’s Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3 at Melanie and Ed’s wedding in 1987. The piece, one of Stephanie’s favorites, would be played at a much more somber occasion more than a decade later.

  The handkerchief waver is flapping so energetically and leaning so far forward he looks like he might fall right off and plunge into the expensive seats below.

  I take a closer look.

  It’s my dad.

  There he stands, pressed up against the balcony railing, his handkerchief unfurled. He is waving that thing like crazy, putting his whole body into the effort. He looks like a mahnyiak, as he might say. I’m overcome with the urge to either jump up and wave back to him or dive under my chair in embarrassment.

  Instead, I wave my bow surreptitiously a bit in acknowledgment, trying to suppress a smile. My dad sits back in his seat, content that I know he is there. Across the darkened space of Avery Fisher Hall, I can see his face, lighting up his spot on the balcony just as sure as if he were plugged into an electric socket. He’s pointing me out to everyone in the seats around him.

  “Mel, it’s unbelievable! People are leaving notes under my windshield wipers in the grocery store parking lot: ‘Do you have room for one more student?’ ”

  After Steph earned her graduate degree, she took a position teaching violin on Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts vacation haven seven miles out at sea. During our frequent phone calls, Steph gives me vivid updates about her new life. “I had to order more violins from the mainland, it’s been crazy!” she says. “Everyone wants to play. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle them all by myself.”

  Steph has developed into an accomplished violinist. But like my dad, she has discovered her true passion is for teaching. Years earlier, he had told a newspaper reporter, “I believe teaching is a profession all its own. It’s no place for a frustrated maestro.” Teaching, for him, isn’t a fallback position. It’s a calling. And Steph has heard the call, too.

  As a teacher, Steph is as gentle and soft-spoken as my father is loud and intimidating. But her approach to the fundamentals is the same. Like him, she assigns her students “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Lightly Row,” but then she mixes in her own transcriptions of Madonna and Bruce Springsteen songs. She rewards her students with stickers, stars, fuzzy-bear pencil toppers, and cookies and milk. Sometimes she allows them to play with one of her pet birds perched on their shoulders.

  As well suited as she is to teaching, though, Steph is ill suited to the isolation of island living. After the seasonal crowds leave, she finds herself alone, living in a house at the end of a long dirt road. Life outside of work is dreary.

  Stephanie teaches multitudes; here, with her Suzuki class on Martha’s Vineyard in 1990.

  During the long winter evenings, Steph turns to her violin for company, preparing a full-length recital program that she schedules for the end of the school year that June. My dad, Ed, and I all come for the occasion. For old time’s sake, Steph and I perform our childhood favorite, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. Ed, succumbing to Steph’s entreaties, drags a vibraphone all the way out to the island on the ferry so he can perform a few jazz tunes for the crowd. My dad beams in the audience. He has presided over more concerts than he can count, but he is never more proud than of this one.

  It is a fitting finale to her time on the island, since Steph has decided it’s time to move on. The next year she takes a new job, to teach violin in a burgeoning suburb—a town named in one survey as among the ten safest in the country—outside of Rochester, New York, called Greece.

  That December, between Pittsburgh Symphony rehearsals, I fly to yet another orchestra audition. I am the last person to play that day, number 23 out of more than 250 applicants, and the committee is tired. Luckily, I don’t know that at the time. Downstairs in the fluorescent-lit basement hallway, after the votes are counted, the personnel manager gives me the good news. I am a finalist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  Coincidentally, my father is also in Chicago for a music convention. I run down Michigan Avenue from Orchestra Hall as fast as I can in high heels, with a violin strapped to my back. The hotel elevator ride takes forever, and when my father opens his door, I fall into his arms, laughing and then dancing around the room.

  “I did it! I did it! I made the finals!”

  “Really? Wow,” my father says, unable to find the words. “WOW.”

  “You’re my good luck charm. You should be in town for all my auditions!”

  “So now what? What’s next? When are the finals?”

  “In April. I have to come back then.”

  “April? That weel give you four more months to practice. Lots of time—you can really prepare.”

  “Don’t you worry, I am going to be prepared.”

  For the next four months back in Pittsburgh I do nothing but sleep, eat, work, and practice. No fun allowed. I set a goal of practicing eight hours on a free day. If I have one rehearsal I can do six hours, and if I have a rehearsal and a concert I can do four. No days off, of course, but that’s nothing new; my dad has prepared me for this since I was little. My fingers bleed, and my neighbors call the police, but nothing is going to get in my way.

  I am playing the best I ever have, but there is more to it than that. In my brain, somethi
ng has clicked. In the old days, when I used to go to auditions, I would walk into the group warm-up room, looking around in awe at the great players surrounding me. I would find a corner and practice frantically until the last possible second before my number was called, fighting the irrational fear that I might somehow forget how to play the violin during the time it took to walk from the warm-up room to the stage.

  Along the way, though, I realized something. There is a missing piece to the puzzle, and it doesn’t involve more practicing. My dad once told a newspaper reporter about student auditions: “Even though they might be strenuous, it’s part of growing up. And we work to prepare the kids, both musically and psychologically.” Now, finally, the psychological piece clicks into place. Before an audition, instead of exhausting myself in the warm-up room, I begin playing just a little to loosen up. Then I take out my knitting. While everyone around me is practicing the hardest parts over and over again, just like I used to do, I instead sit calmly knitting, centering my thoughts, focusing, relaxing.

  The first few times it is difficult to break the pattern, to believe that it is more than just the sheer quantity of hours, the number of miles logged on the bow, that is going to win me a job. But I realize there is something else, something far more elusive. It’s not in my fingers, it’s in my head.

  When I figure that out, everything else falls into place. And in April, Sir Georg Solti offers me a position as a violinist with the famed Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

  15

  Duets

  JOANNE

  In the decade after I graduated from high school, I only saw Mr. K once. Melanie gave a recital on the East Brunswick High School auditorium stage, presenting the program she had prepared for her New England Conservatory master’s degree in performance.

  I brought along Tom, the boy I was dating, and introduced him to Mr. K at the punch-and-cookies reception in the old orchestra rehearsal room afterward. Mr. K gave Tom an only slightly suspicious “What are your intentions?” once-over before extending his hand. As Mr. K moved along to speak to other well-wishers, I made a quick exit. I had to get back to work.

  There wasn’t much room for the viola in my new life as a Wall Street Journal reporter. I wrote about the insurance business, then about the real estate business. I was in awe of the other reporters in the newsroom. They were smart and funny; sometimes I just sat back in my cubicle and listened to them working their sources on the phone, then tried to mimic their technique for cajoling and coaxing information out of reluctant executives.

  I worked on a manual typewriter, on carbon paper in triplicate—the Journal was among the last technological holdouts and still hadn’t warmed up to computers in the newsroom. My boss, Larry, marked up my copy with vast swaths of red pen, peppering me with fifty questions on stories that ran only fifteen sentences.

  Where is this company based? What does it do? How old is the executive? Is he AN executive vice president or THE executive vice president? Is that earnings or revenue? Is she a “Miss” or a “Mrs.”? Do you realize you used twenty-seven semicolons in three paragraphs?

  I had a lot to learn as a reporter and even more to learn as a business reporter. I didn’t know how to read a balance sheet and had taken only one semester of economics. The most useful skill I had acquired so far was a legacy from years with Mr. K: a thick skin. I didn’t get easily intimidated. Executives could bluff or badger or patronize me, or yell at me after a story ran, but whatever they dished out, I could take. I had already been toughened up. I had Mr. K to thank for that.

  My musical activity steadily dwindled and soon consisted primarily of listening to my Walkman on the subway. I practiced my viola every once in a while and briefly played in a community orchestra, but it was dispiriting to realize that my technique was getting rusty and there weren’t enough after-work hours to fix it.

  I did make time to volunteer with a local senior citizens group. Every Sunday, I spent the afternoon sitting in the musty living room of a housebound widow who was nearing one hundred years old. She couldn’t remember what she did yesterday or this morning, and she frequently forgot who I was. But every week she recounted vibrantly detailed stories about her childhood. She told me about her father, a Confederate soldier in the Civil War who lied about his age to enlist at fifteen; the southern plantation on which she grew up; her twelve older brothers. Her mother just kept on having babies until she finally got a girl.

  The widow’s apartment, a study in faded elegance, was a small, dark two-bedroom on the second floor of a fancy building off Park Avenue. The living room faced an airshaft. When you looked out, you couldn’t tell what the weather was, or whether it was morning or night. She spoke in wistful detail about the eleven-room Park Avenue apartment she and her Harvard-educated lawyer husband shared until they lost everything and downsized during the Depression. Each week, before I left, she offered up her papery cheek for a kiss.

  I couldn’t have told you why, but I enjoyed our visits at least as much as she did. They reminded me of something. It was only later that I realized I was re-creating those trips to nursing homes and hospitals with Mr. K. They going to want to touch you, to hug and kiss you, I could still hear him saying. Let them.

  Most of my hours, though, were spent at work. My boss wisely paired me up with one of the most experienced reporters in the newsroom, a ferociously competitive fireball named Dan Hertzberg. I would trot after him, tripping over my scuffed black pumps, as he sped along the pockmarked sidewalks and through Wall Street canyons. One day, after we cowrote a short and not terribly momentous news story, I came running into the newsroom, waving a copy of the New York Times.

  “Dan, Dan, our story is better than the Times’s story!”

  Dan just looked at me in stony silence. Then he shot back: “Not better enough.”

  I had to smile. Not better enough. That could have been Mr. K’s motto. Dan was articulating something that had been drilled into me for my entire life: Next time work harder. Again!

  In the newsroom, my colleagues and I laughingly called that kind of thinking a “healthy neurosis,” but we meant it as a compliment: it was that quality of having just enough anxiety to triple-check a fact or make one more phone call. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously said, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

  Kierkegaard had nothing on Mr. K, who could have taught the course on that one.

  I would have mentioned that to Mr. K if I talked to him at all. But I didn’t. I was preoccupied with my job and my boyfriend and my friends and the new life I was making in New York City. Most days I worked until late at night. On occasional summer evenings I ran out by seven P.M. to go with Tom to hear the free New York Philharmonic concerts in the park. We listened to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff on a batik blanket while eating the romantic picnics he packed of champagne and cheese and fresh bread from Zabar’s delicatessen. When I turned twenty-five, I married him.

  I tried to keep up with the viola. For a couple of months I played duets with a violist friend. Sometimes I made it to symphony concerts, but they frustrated me. I would watch the viola players, who usually were performing some orchestral work I had once played myself, and feel guilty: I should be practicing. When I was nine months pregnant, I briefly joined a quartet through the Ninety-Second Street Y, figuring I would get some time to play during maternity leave. Like many mothers-to-be, I was hopelessly naive about how life was about to change.

  When Rebecca was born, and then Andrew two years later, it was clear my playing days were over. I shoved my viola in its case, the address of my college dormitory still stuck on front with peeling tape, into the back of my closet and forgot about it.

  MELANIE

  As the plane touches down in Leningrad, I glance apprehensively at my father next to me. “Are you okay, Daddy?”

  He is clutching the armrests of his seat, his chin bobbing ever so slightly up and down. His eyes are fixed on the window. I follow his gaz
e. Uniformed soldiers are stationed on the tarmac outside, machine guns at their sides.

  “Fine, fine,” he says with an awkward shake of his head, apparently intended to convey confidence. “It makes me uncomfortable to see all these guns, that’s all.”

  My father has been ill at ease since we embarked on our trip. I’ve been with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for more than a year now, and I invited him to join me on the orchestra’s tour of the Soviet Union. He hasn’t been back to the Old Country since he fled Ukraine forty years earlier. The Communist threat has haunted him ever since. As a little girl, I thought his name was on a list somewhere in the country, and that he could be snatched away from me and banished to the gulags. But now, in 1990, the Soviet Union is in the thrall of glasnost. The Berlin Wall has fallen. Shouldn’t he have gotten over his fear by now?

  Traveling together this way is new to us, a strange role reversal. We’re on my turf now. I give my dad instructions, anxious that he not misbehave somehow and embarrass me in front of my new colleagues. I feel my face flush when, at the airport, he struggles with the buttons on his coat. In line for security, while he fumbles with his carry-on bag—“eet’s new, the zippers are treecky”—I snap at him: “Hurry up, Daddy! We don’t want to get left behind the group.” I grab the bag away from him and close it myself, glancing around to make sure none of my colleagues have seen. Oh my God, he’s getting old, I think.

  On the long flight over, my dad calms himself with a double vodka before falling into a fitful sleep. I stay awake, watching him covertly from behind my book. He has never had time or money for “gallivanting” all over the place like some people, as he always says. But he’s given up his orchestra conducting duties, passing his baton to a new generation, including Gordon Tedeschi: the boy who challenged me at ASTA when I was nine years old now directs the East Brunswick High School orchestra. My dad has cut back on his private teaching schedule, too. As I turn the pages of my book without reading them, I steal a glance at his snoring form. He has always taken energy from his students, as if they fueled him with some sort of hormone-amped adrenaline cocktail. Without them, he seems suddenly older, tired. A little bit lost.