Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  At one point, Melanie got up to perform a solo in Steph’s memory. It was “Méditation” from Thaïs, by Massenet, and it was the most heartbreaking piece I’ve ever heard. I wiped my eyes, smearing my makeup across my cheeks, and as she sat back down, I said something dumb and hopelessly inadequate like, “What a beautiful tribute to Steph.” Melanie didn’t look at me. She was somewhere far away, far from everyone else.

  Afterward, I was surprised by the size of the crowd, which overflowed into the lobby. Mr. K’s old students and their parents had converged in force. Some still lived in town, but many had traveled a far distance. My old friend Jonathan, the smartest boy in our class, was there. Now he was a doctor; he had driven in from Boston with his glamorous Italian neurobiologist wife.

  Miriam’s family was there, too. Of the seven kids in her family—all of them students of Mr. K—four of them had become either teachers or musicians. Her parents were there as well, along with many other parents I recognized, older now, their children long grown, but determined to be there to support Mr. K.

  But mostly, there were Mr. K’s former students—younger students, older students, from dewy twentysomethings to graying near-retirees. At the reception afterward, throngs of the now-grown pupils greeted one another, introducing their spouses, trading addresses, and running after toddlers. The room was rippling with happy shrieks of recognition. Children ran around with cookies and punch.

  I was talking with Jonathan’s mother when Mr. K approached me. He gathered me in one more hug, and I saw tears in his eyes.

  He motioned to the crowd circulating around him. “Thees was Stephanie’s last gift,” he told me. “To bring us all back together again.”

  18

  Meditation

  MELANIE

  At the church for the memorial service, there is a large portrait of my beautiful sister. When I arrive, the organist, a family friend whose two sons studied with my father, is playing. The portrait and the music together overwhelm me, and I break down, retreating into the ladies’ room to recover.

  Somehow I manage to play “Méditation” from Thaïs, the mournful piece that I played at my mother’s funeral, the one my father taught me as a little girl. It is my father’s favorite piece of music. There is no better way to say good-bye to our Stephanie.

  The last note of the “Méditation” quivers to an end. Still trembling, half blinded by tears, I make my way to my seat in the front pew next to Joanne. She reaches over and squeezes my hand reassuringly.

  “That was such a beautiful tribute to Steph,” she whispers.

  “It was so hard not to cry… my bow was shaking…” Even though I am accustomed to performing onstage in front of thousands of people several times a week, this was infinitely more difficult. The emotion was overwhelming. “That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

  Then it’s time for our quartet to play. Miriam, Joanne, Darlene, and I perform Bach’s Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3, the piece Steph had played at my wedding.

  Our old quartet is reunited one last time. Minus one.

  In Miriam’s very large, wonderful family there is a sensitive, kind funeral director named Joe. He drives us to the cemetery in the limousine, and I sit in front next to him. On the seat between us is a little box. I ride the whole way, more than an hour, with my hand on that box of my sister’s ashes. It is our last ride together, and it is as close as I can get to holding her hand.

  When we get to the cemetery, we are each given a rose to place beside the little box, which is to be buried next to my mother. I hold tight to my father’s hand. I bend down to kiss the little box and have the sensation that I could just keep falling down down down until I am next to her, and then I could stay with her forever.

  But Daddy needs me, and Ed needs me, and Nicholas, Gregory, and Laura need me. As my father has been all these years, I must be strong. So I stand up and walk back to the limousine and back to my family, back to my life.

  My grandmother Baba makes it to the church for Stephanie’s service, but she is too frail to go with us to the cemetery. She is closing in on her one hundredth birthday and is finally starting to slow down. By the time my family makes our next visit to New Jersey, she is in the hospital. When we arrive there, she is lying on a gurney in the chilly hospital corridor, awaiting a scan, berating everyone within earshot. We can hear her shrill voice even before we turn the corner and see her.

  “Mother, look who eez here!” my dad says. “Malanka and Ed haf brought the children to see you.”

  My dad looks anxiously at the nurse standing nearby, who nods encouragingly. We file up to her bedside, murmuring our greetings. An explosion of Ukrainian erupts from my supine grandmother, her arms waving wildly. My father responds in soothing tones, clearly trying his best to placate her, while the six-year-old twins edge behind me nervously. After a few minutes, she seems a bit calmer and my dad gestures to Nicky.

  “Nick? Why don’t you play a leetle of your Vivaldi for Baba? Eez okay eef he plays violin for her here?” my father asks the nurse.

  “Of course! That would be lovely! Mrs. DeBaylo, you never told us you had a musician in the family!” The nurse gratefully grabs the lifeline we’ve thrown her.

  Baba snarls a response, but you can tell that some of the fight has already started to go out of her. Eight-year-old Nicky obediently unpacks and I tune him up quickly. A small crowd gathers as Nick energetically plunges into his concerto. The nurses and wandering patients who have stood by listening break into applause when he’s done.

  “That’s mine grand-grandson,” Baba says triumphantly.

  My father and I exchange a smile.

  I fight with myself for a long while about whether to insist that the twins learn violin, too. At first I assume they will play, just as Steph and I had. But my struggles with Nick give me pause. Maybe I should let them decide for themselves, when they are old enough to make a decision.

  Having twins, so soon after Nick was born, was overwhelming enough. The thought of teaching them both—when it’s a difficult proposition just to raise them while maintaining some semblance of control over the house—is terrifying.

  Besides, I want my own children to be able to participate in all the activities that I had not. As they get older, the boys play ice hockey, and Laura takes figure skating lessons. Over the years there are very few activities that one or another of my kids doesn’t try. There’s Irish dancing and Tae Kwon Do, theater and soccer, baseball and art lessons and tennis and lacrosse and Spanish classes and chess club. I don’t want to relive my own childhood. I don’t want to prevent them from trying other activities, or playing with their friends. I don’t want to burden them with endless practicing.

  Still, I can’t imagine life without music. This is my special gift. How can I not share it with them? I’ve learned from my father that music truly is meant to be given away, to be shared with others, even if it has to be delivered to their bedside. He didn’t just teach me to play the violin; he taught me that it is necessary for people to have music in their lives.

  It’s a huge commitment of time and energy to hold daily practice sessions with each child. I’ve enrolled them in outside music lessons. But as my father did with me, I supervise each of them as they practice. Squeezing the violin into our already packed days is monumentally difficult. When a child is tired, hungry, distracted, or just plain not in the mood, practicing is unproductive, and achieving optimal conditions is almost as rare as a total eclipse of the sun.

  Every day I ask myself if it’s worth it: the cajoling, the yelling, the tears. If they want to quit, so be it. More than once I offer—but the answer is always no. So every time we travel to the East Coast to visit the extended family, three little violins are stowed in our van among the suitcases, camera bag, carsick bag, the telescope for moon gazing at Aunt Pat’s, the buckets of worms and bags of horse manure fertilizer we collect at Aunt Jane’s, snacks, pillows, and plenty of CDs ranging from jazz and musicals to the kids’
Suzuki practice tapes.

  Like my father, I take my children to nursing homes with our violins to play for the elderly and infirm. When Christmas rolls around, we put together a program of carols and cheerful classics that we perform at local hospitals with family friends. We become regulars on the hospital–nursing home circuit, stopping with our violins at my old aunt Titka’s nursing home in Ohio before heading to Ed’s mother in a home in Warwick, New York, where, though I don’t realize it, Joanne spends weekends at her house just down the road.

  “Well, that needs a lot of work.”

  My dad is listening over the phone as the twins play Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, the piece Steph and I performed at her last recital.

  It is always with some trepidation that I have my children play for my dad. Often, when they play for him in person, he’ll pull them into a hug, murmuring, “That was beautiful,” into their soft red-gold hair. When he goes back home to New Jersey, he learns how to use Skype on his computer to watch them perform, the better for him to keep an eye on their technique and posture.

  But when he thinks there’s room for improvement, he can be brutal. He’s dismissive of their Suzuki training, which teaches young children to memorize tunes rather than to read notes. “I had you reading notes before you could read words!” he harrumphs. He instructs them to use “More bow!” or to make “Beeg sound!”

  It is hard for me not to take his criticisms personally. I always want my children to play well, to show my father that I’m guiding them properly and that the legacy of music in the Kupchynsky family lives on. My dad likes to grade me. Not long ago when he came to visit, I drove him to a Chicago Symphony concert to watch me perform. As we got out of the car in the parking garage next to Symphony Center, he looked back with a frown: “I’d geev you parking job a B-plus.”

  My children don’t seem nearly as rattled by his criticism as I am, but I explain his reaction just in case.

  “Grandpa used to be a teacher,” I say to Laura and Greg after they finish their piece. “He was a teacher for so long, he enjoys fixing the music, making it better. It’s part of the fun for him.”

  The day he stops criticizing is the day I start worrying.

  JOANNE

  Rebecca’s eleventh birthday was the next day. She had asked for refrigerator magnets to decorate her school locker. That’s why I was inside the World Trade Center at 8:46 A.M. I had stopped there on my way to work at the Wall Street Journal office, across the street. I had found the perfect magnet, shaped like a violin, in one of the concourse-level shops. The magnet had a button in the middle, and when you pushed it, it played a little tune. I hoped it would be a gentle reminder to Rebecca to practice for her violin lessons. I pressed it idly while waiting at the cash register.

  “Everybody’s running!” the young woman at the counter suddenly said, looking out at a crowd of people being shooed toward the exit by a security guard. “Maybe we should get out of here.”

  I pushed the magnet firmly toward her.

  She looked anxiously toward the door. “We’ve got to leave.”

  I rolled my eyes. Please. People in this town overreact. We hadn’t heard anything. The commuters being herded past the store looked more annoyed than worried. It was probably a false alarm.

  “Ring this up first. I’m not leaving until I pay.”

  Hastily, she rang up the purchase.

  The receipt read 8:55 A.M., SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.

  When I emerged from the building onto Church Street a minute later, blinking in the sunlight, it was snowing. At least it looked like snow, as pulverized plaster drifted down from a brilliant blue sky, pinging metallically when the flakes hit the sunglasses perched on top of my head. Hundreds of papers—blank financial order forms—were wafting through the air. Above us was the unimaginable sight of the World Trade Center on fire, smoke billowing out of an ugly gash in the upper floors. In front of us, cars were pulled up at crazy angles on the sidewalk, abandoned. One was crushed by a giant chunk of concrete. There must have been sirens, and maybe there was shouting, but it was as if it were a dream: every sound was muffled and every action in slow motion.

  For a moment I stood with my colleague Joe, who was at the store with me, staring upward, trying to comprehend what appeared to be one of the worst aviation accidents in history. Then we made a dash for the office, for this would clearly be a huge news day.

  Turning the corner, trying to get to our building, we were plunged into a war zone. The force of the crash had thrown the debris forward onto Liberty Street, where we now stood. Everything was on fire. Rows of flaming seats were sprawled in the middle of the road, along with what looked like a jet engine. We detoured to avoid the flames and found ourselves fleeing through a side street that was infinitely worse. Human carnage, raw and red, was splattered thickly across the pavement and the sidewalks. We picked our way through an indescribable hell, our heads down, stepping gingerly and trying not to look at the gruesome vista spread out in front of us. When we reached the West Side Highway, across from our building, we swerved to avoid a headless corpse on the sidewalk that someone had inadequately covered with a restaurant napkin. Waiting at a red light, we stood next to a businessman with a head wound streaming blood onto his white shirt collar.

  That’s where we were when the second plane came in, so loud it sounded as if it were only inches above our heads. The crash was a sonic boom, a deep, deafening, cataclysmic eruption that went on and on, layer after sickening layer of destruction. Animal instinct took over. Everyone on the street ran, diving for cover. Bags, briefcases, and shoes were scattered, abandoned in the middle of the road. I found myself flattened against the back wall of the Journal building. Like everyone else there, I assumed I was about to die. In that moment, I felt strangely calm.

  It was only afterward, with the explosion still echoing, that the group of dazed people hugging the walls slowly pulled away, realizing this was no accident. The building was now locked, so Joe and I joined the exodus trying to escape, making our way on foot underneath both burning towers as people jumped from the top floors. Minutes later, when the towers collapsed, the Journal building was severely damaged, too. I walked uptown to a colleague’s apartment that had been hastily transformed into a newsroom.

  For the next ten months, with the Journal building uninhabitable, much of the newspaper’s staff would all but live in a makeshift office in New Jersey. Tom took over at home. On that first night of September 11, I had gotten back to our apartment close to midnight. At home, trying to drive away the day’s grisly images, I baked a birthday cake for Rebecca. By the time she woke up the next morning I was gone, back to work.

  I ended up missing Rebecca’s birthday that day, and Andrew’s a month later, and most other major events that year. I also missed doctors’ appointments. By the time I got around to the mammogram appointment I was supposed to have had on my fortieth birthday, a year had passed. It was the summer of 2002, and the doctor kept me in the office for hours, kept sending me back in to that god-awful machine for retakes of the pictures. Finally, she ushered me into her office.

  “You’ve got a lump. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it.”

  A surgical biopsy a few weeks later confirmed her suspicions: I had breast cancer.

  The disease was caught early, the doctor told me, and hadn’t spread. My prognosis was good. Still, given that I was relatively young and my kids were still in grade school, we decided to treat it aggressively. Lumpectomy, six months of chemotherapy, two months of radiation. Can I do both treatments at once? I asked of the doctor.

  “Not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “You won’t be able to work if you do chemo and radiation at the same time.” Usually those two treatments are given consecutively, the doctor said. The punch of both together is debilitating. You’ll be too weak to do both. Your body can’t handle it.

  Try me, I said.

  It didn’t occur to me to take off time for the t
reatments. Of course I would work through it. What else could I do? I would keep working because I had to; I didn’t have the luxury to take off, or so I told myself. What would I have done other than wallow if I did? Work was a tonic; there really is no such thing as happiness without hard work. Someone told me that once, I thought.

  The treatments made me nauseated and dizzy and bone-tired, and my head often felt stuffed with cotton. I could get through the workday but had no energy for anything else. I withdrew from social engagements; I didn’t have the bandwidth to see friends, much less keep up with the people I had reconnected with at Steph’s memorial service. I lost touch with Mr. K.

  I came up with a routine to deal with the side effects. After my chemo sessions on Thursday afternoons, I would take the weekend to recover, waiting for the worst of the nausea and fatigue to pass. Tom would take the kids out for ice cream or to a movie while I sat immobile in a chair with the lights turned down low, unable to focus enough to read or even watch TV.

  Nausea medicines didn’t seem to help. Closing my eyes didn’t help, either; even while sitting still, I was knocked off kilter by vertigo. But there was one thing that eased my symptoms: classical music. Especially Bach. A lifetime ago, I had performed plenty of Bach with Mr. K. There was a wonderful order and restraint to the composer’s work that somehow unraveled the cottony mess that was my brain and allowed me to breathe calmly and think straight. I would sit back and let the music fill me, and somehow, it seemed to push the toxins right out of my system. Strange, I thought, how music is the one way to keep myself sane. To cope.