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Strings Attached

Page 24

by Joanne Lipman


  While we talk, Laura busies herself trying on my mother’s necklaces. I always bring my mom costume jewelry from our overseas tours, and Laura is happily running her fingers along the shiny coils of amber and jade and colorful seashells. Conversation is difficult. My mom is having trouble holding up her end, nodding off occasionally while we speak. After a while, she gives up trying. Instead, softly, my mom begins to sing.

  “You made me love you…,” she starts, as she smiles at me and then at Laura.

  “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it,” I join her, just as I did when I was a little girl.

  And so we sing together, like Steph and I used to do when we were barely older than my own daughter is now. My mother’s voice is weak, but in my mind I can still hear her, singing out clear and strong from her wheelchair by the living room window, patiently teaching us the words, the melody, the harmony. Laura watches us, transfixed.

  Before we leave, my mom directs me to her bookshelf, where I find a wrapped package.

  “For your birthday,” she says.

  “Mom, my birthday is months away!”

  She shrugs a little and looks at me with her beautiful blue eyes, the same eyes I see when I look at my daughter’s face. I swallow hard, sensing that there is more to be said. But she doesn’t speak. Finally, I do, telling her I’ll wait to open the gift until my birthday, and we’ll talk about it then. After I leave the room, we’ve almost reached the elevator when I tell my dad to wait just a minute. I run back to her room and throw my arms around her once more. “Please be around for my birthday,” I whisper.

  “I’ll try,” she says.

  A few weeks later, my father calls to tell me my mother is dead.

  When I fly back to New Jersey, Miriam and her mother, Charlotte, help me plan my mother’s funeral. She has left detailed instructions, so there are not many decisions to be made. At her request, I will play the “Méditation” from Thaïs on my violin at the service. It’s the soulful, heartbreaking piece that my dad taught me for my first solo recital when I was a little girl, when I was too young to appreciate the meaning behind it. Now I fear I understand it much too well.

  After we go over the details, I make my way to the nursing home, picking through my mother’s shower-stall-turned-closet to choose her prettiest outfit for burial. But shoes are a problem. Ever since her fall, back when I was four years old, my mother had stopped buying the beautiful shoes she once collected. They seemed a useless taunt to her, once her feet could no longer carry her.

  At home, I go digging around in my dad’s basement to see if she has left any footwear behind. I open a little-used closet at the bottom of the stairs and push my way through my mother’s wedding gown and the green gingham dress I wore for the ninth grade production of Bye Bye Birdie. I pull out old Halloween costumes and the devil mask my dad used when his orchestra performed Orpheus in the Underworld. I’m about to give up when I notice, on the floor in the back, a stack of shoeboxes. I reach for them, eagerly tearing off the lids.

  There they are: my mother’s old high-heeled shoes, the ones I used to stomp around in when I was just a little girl and she was still able to walk. Somehow they have stayed here in the bottom of the closet for all these years, waiting to be rediscovered.

  Searching through the stack, I pick out the highest heels I can find. They are in a mouthwatering shade of blue that just matches my mother’s eyes.

  “Okay, guys, time to clean up! What do you want for dinner? Oh my gosh, look at the time… let’s go!”

  The years following my mother’s death pass in a blur of concerts and tours interspersed with potty training, playdates, and trips to the zoo. Our children have taken over our lives, and Ed and I love every minute of it. We see more of my dad, too. His solitary life is transformed when he meets his new next-door neighbor, Joan, an avid gardener like him who has three grown daughters of her own. Their friendship flourishes, and after a brief courtship they marry. In their new house, just down the street from his old one, my father teaches a few private students, plants flowers and vegetables, and starts working on a project with the help of Miriam’s father: compiling a book of poetry that he has written, in Ukrainian, over the past fifty years. My dad and Joan break away as often as they can to visit us.

  Late one afternoon, two years after my mother’s death, the kids and I are ankle-deep in toys. Legos, dollhouse furniture, blocks, and books are scattered across the floor. The four-year-old twins, Laura and Gregory, are tumbling around, laughing and speaking a secret language that no one else, including me, can decipher. Nick, a solemn six-year-old, is trying to make his Lego tower stand up straight.

  I glance at my watch, wondering if I can fit in Nick’s violin practicing before dinner. I signed him up for lessons a year ago, when he turned five, around the same age Steph and I had been when we began lessons. I’ve given him my own first pint-size violin, dependable old Violet. It’s a perfect fit for his little fingers. I figure that between my own music education background and watching my dad all those years, I can teach a monkey to play the violin.

  But I didn’t count on Nick.

  Getting Nick to practice in the few hours after school and before dinner and my evening concert schedule is an exercise in futility. He squirms and wiggles and can’t stand still. He never walks in a straight line but flings himself from one spot to the next. He’s so hard to pin down, much less to teach, that I draw paper shoe prints on the floor for him to stand on and load marbles on top of his feet, bribing him with candy if he can get through a lesson without them rolling off.

  I try to make it fun, exhausting my ingenuity as I attempt ever more creative ways to get him to focus. I use all my dad’s tricks, too—they work remarkably well—and like him, I insist on perfect form and intonation. But I don’t use a timer, and neither Ed nor I would ever spank our kids. Even so, I find myself yelling, saying all the things my dad said that I vowed I never would, like “What is wrong with you?!” until Ed says, “You should hear yourself screaming. It’s not good for him and not good for you, either. You sound just like your father!”

  Now the kids are flinging their toys around the living room, dinner isn’t ready, Nick hasn’t practiced, and my concert is coming up in just a couple of hours. In the confusion, the telephone chooses that moment to ring.

  “Is this Melanie Koop-a-chinsky?”

  “That’s Kupchynsky, yes.”

  The caller identifies herself as a newspaper reporter from Rochester. Then she asks, with brisk efficiency: “Can you comment on the news that the remains of a woman were discovered in the woods today near Greece, New York?”

  Somehow I manage to turn on The Lion King to distract the kids and get out of the room in the space of a heartbeat. It takes another beat for me to start to understand what she’s said.

  “Do they know who it is? Why are you calling me?” My heart has started up again and, shot through with adrenaline, is now pounding audibly in my chest.

  “Yes, they have identified the remains as Stephanie Kupchynsky, the music teacher. Have the police not called you?”

  I am stunned into silence.

  “I’m so sorry,” the reporter says. “I thought you would have heard by now. Can I get a reaction? Are you surprised?”

  That is how I learn that the seven-year-long search for my sister is over.

  JOANNE

  Our apartment was chaos. The living room was engulfed in giant, primary-colored plastic toys. Five-year-old Andrew loved sports. There was the red plastic T-ball. The blue-and-orange plastic slide. Various sizes of plastic basketballs and soccer balls that left black scuff marks when he threw them against the walls.

  Andrew’s room was a shrine to Thomas the Tank Engine. Curtains, rug, pillows—all paid tribute to Thomas, as did the little wooden trains that were constantly underfoot on his bedroom floor. Rebecca’s room, befitting a budding ballerina, was pink, a color she recently decided she hated. Her floor was littered with bobby pins and hairnets a
nd ballet shoes that needed the ribbons sewn on. She was dancing around, practicing her party scene role in The Nutcracker.

  I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about housekeeping. I had become an editor at the Wall Street Journal, first working on Page One and most recently creating a new section called Weekend Journal as its editor in chief. The seven-days-a-week crush of launch mode crowded out brain space for anything else. My work hours were a scrim of meetings. My nights were spent immersed in page proofs that I marked up with red felt-tipped pens in between reading the kids their bedtime stories.

  Now I flopped on my bed, surrounded by catalogs, comparing girls’ pink fleece anoraks from a half-a-dozen stores, brainstorming a new weekly feature that would be called Catalog Critic. “Remember to practice!” I called out absently to Rebecca.

  There were two activities that I required of our children: going to Hebrew school and taking music lessons. Both qualified as religion, I guess you could say.

  We had started both kids on piano, and Rebecca studied violin as well, but they were indifferent students. For Rebecca, ballet held much more appeal, which to my mind was just as good: She danced in ballets composed by Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. She studied at the School of American Ballet, the training school of the New York City Ballet, where her fierce old Russian teacher poked at her feet with a cane. I found it oddly comforting.

  Andrew, meanwhile, had just discovered the French horn. He was inspired by Ronni’s horn-playing son, Steven. In fact, between my sisters and me, all seven of our children played instruments, and Steven would go on to become a professional musician. Mr. K’s influence had extended to the next generation.

  Of course, insisting that my kids play an instrument was one thing; doing it myself was another. My children had never even seen my old viola, much less heard me play it. That was long ago and far away. I was far too preoccupied with other things. Like the six pink anoraks I was studying in six different catalogs, all spread out across my rumpled bedspread.

  That’s when the phone rang.

  “It’s Miriam.”

  The cellist from our old quartet! I hadn’t heard from her in years.

  “Miriam! How are you?”

  “Stephanie’s remains have been found.”

  That stopped me short.

  I stood, sinking my bare toes into the bedroom carpet as she told me the details. A couple of brothers, eleven and thirteen years old, were fishing in a shallow stream in upstate New York. They were chasing the fish, sloshing through foot-high water. They stumbled over something and bent down to take a look. Turned out they had run right into human bones.

  How long had it been since Stephanie’s disappearance? I thought back, back to when I first heard the news from Mr. K, when Rebecca was a baby and Andrew hadn’t yet been born. Seven years.

  A memory tugged at the base of my brain, coming into focus like something out of a long-forgotten dream. Stephanie as a little girl, eight years old, perched on the arm of my chair, her thin arm thrown casually around my neck, her breath gently tickling my ear as she laughed. Her hair, brushing my cheek as she bent to look more closely at the book we were reading together while I waited for my lesson. Her hand, pointing to the pictures as we screeched in delight. The book, The Bog People. The photos, of murder victims discovered by fishermen sloshing through the shallows.

  I shook off a chill. Miriam was saying something about a memorial service.

  “We’ve picked out the church, in East Brunswick,” she said. “So we’re all set. See you then.”

  My thoughts snapped back to work, to looming deadlines. Certainly I wanted to go—how could I miss it? I furiously calculated article assignments and deadline timetables in my head, trying to see how I could squeeze in some time away from the office.

  “If I can get out of work, I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Of course you’ll be there,” Miriam snapped. “You’re playing in it.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.

  “Our quartet is performing for the service. Darlene Brandt is playing Stephanie’s part.”

  “But Miriam, I don’t play anymore!”

  “You do now.”

  A few weeks later, I found myself standing nervously on the doorstep of Mr. K’s house. He had remarried by now, and he and his new wife, Joan, had moved to a newly built home down the street. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years.

  I was a boss back at work, but here I was a cowering kid again. My mother drove me. On the doorstep, as I heard the door creak open, I edged uneasily behind her, like I did when I was five years old.

  As the door swung open, for a split-second I got a glimpse of Mr. K, reassuringly familiar with his combed-over hair and trim little mustache. Then he was on the steps with me, throwing his arms around me and holding me tight in a bear hug. “My baby!” he said, hugging me tighter. “My baby! You’re back.” We stayed that way for a long time, arms wrapped around each other, not wanting to let go.

  It was only after he finally stepped back that I got a good look at him. He was shorter than I remembered, and frail. His hair had thinned. He had an unmistakable wobble to his head. But he was most recognizably my old Mr. K, now grabbing me by the hand to lead me inside.

  I had never been happier to see anyone.

  Melanie and Miriam were already in the house, warming up on their instruments. Miriam, who had become a music teacher herself, looked the same as she had in high school, with her thick long hair and warm smile, except she was pregnant. Her husband sat on the couch with their infant daughter. Melanie was practicing behind a closed door. Listening to her spectacular riffs, I was intimidated all over again.

  Darlene Brandt, who had started out as Mr. K’s frightened student and had gone on to become one of our teachers, was there, too. She would be playing second violin, filling in the position Stephanie had played in our quartet. Darlene’s own father had died before her wedding. Mr. K had walked her down the aisle.

  I unpacked my viola while listening to Melanie behind that door. We had barely been in touch for the last twenty years, aside from trading birth announcements. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other. She sounded so confident, her playing strong and powerful, the music soaring to emotional heights that reminded me of when I used to sit in the audience listening to her when we were kids. I imagined her striding out of the room, self-assured, a world traveler now, maybe a little arrogant. She could afford to swagger, after all, being at the top of her profession. I looked down at my viola, now unfamiliarly cradled under one elbow. It felt like an alien, and I like a musical imposter.

  Finally, the door opened and Melanie emerged, violin in one hand. The thoughts racing through my head came to a halt. As powerful as her playing was, her demeanor was as shy as ever. She barely looked up. It was almost as if we were meeting for the first time again, when we were ten and she peeked through the lesson-room door while her dad was yelling at her for his tea and simultaneously yelling at me to play it “Again!”

  After an awkward greeting, we settled down to rehearse, setting up in formation in Mr. K’s finished basement. As we tuned our instruments, I was so nervous that my right hand clutched the bow in a death grip. When we first turned to play Bach’s beautiful, solemn Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3, my bow skittered across the strings. But then something happened. It was like we were kids again. All the years in between disappeared. We were all breathing together. We had such different lives now, but somehow it was as if we were all thinking with one brain. And it felt as if Stephanie was right there with us. The memory of that old connection between us kicked in, and I realized that it had never gone away. It was inside us all the time.

  The basement had a big stereo, so that Mr. K could blast his classical music, and a bar at one end. That’s where Mr. K was now. I noticed his hands shaking alarmingly as he poured drinks, while the wobbling of his head marked a different rhythm all its own. Still, he was smiling as he looked out at us, watching us p
lay.

  “Thees room eez just for me,” he said, after insisting we try it “one more time—again.” A playful look momentarily wiped away the pain that I had seen on his face earlier. “See? I got my own Black Russian bar.”

  At the church for the memorial mass the next day, an enormous poster-size photo of Stephanie, propped up on an easel in front of the altar, greeted us. The picture stopped me short. It was difficult to look at but impossible to look away. The photo was the same one that I had seen in my parents’ newspaper seven years ago. Stephanie, with her beautiful dark eyes and porcelain skin, with a little smile on her face, ready to break into a giggle. Melanie excused herself and ran from the sanctuary.

  When I first saw that photo seven years ago, Steph was still a member of our generation. She looked a lot like the rest of us in our quartet. But since then, I had had a second child, become an editor, fixed up our fixer-upper house. Melanie had had three kids and toured the world. Miriam had married, started a family, and taught too many students to count how to play instruments. We would all be pushing forty before we knew it.

  And then there was Stephanie. In the photo, she was in her midtwenties—almost a generation younger than we were now. With each day, that gap was widening. You could feel it, that she was slipping away from us, receding into the past as we plowed into the future. We would continue to build lives and careers, to collect wrinkles and gray hairs, and to watch our children grow. She would stay that age forever. She was beautiful, but she was in amber. No—she was gone.

  Mr. K, accustomed to an audience, seemed to be more collected than any of us as he greeted the crowd. I was too rattled to notice that the church had filled to capacity. The four of us in the quartet unpacked our instruments and sat in formation, to the side of the altar, listening to the service. We performed our Bach Air, and I saw a few people in the front rows dabbing at their eyes.

 

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