Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

My parents came to visit and my dad brought me a recording of the Yale Cellos performing an all-Bach program. He figured I would get a kick out of a group based at my alma mater. I flipped through the credits—a roster of the best young cellists in the world, from every country imaginable—to see if any of the performers were college classmates. Several were, but what struck me was another name listed among the brilliant musicians on the recording: Miriam Kling Perkoff, who had been a few years behind me back in East Brunswick. The last time I’d seen her, she was a cute little girl sitting behind the other Miriam, our quartet’s cellist. I didn’t know she had gone on to become a musician.

  On the first anniversary of 9/11, we were woken up at five A.M. by the sound of bagpipers marching down Broadway just in front of our apartment, slowly making their mournful journey down to Ground Zero. I had just come off two cancer surgeries and was about to start chemo treatments. At work, we were immersed in coverage of the anniversary. So was every other news outlet in the country.

  A lot of powerful journalism would mark that solemn day. But one of the most moving was a newspaper column that appeared half a continent away, in the Daily Herald in Utah. It was a stirring treatise about freedom and patriotism, and about how to teach those values to our kids.

  Advocates were calling for “classes to specifically teach children to have love for their country…,” the writer noted. “Those people should take lessons from a teacher I had who gave eloquent lessons on the liberty guaranteed by this country.”

  This teacher, the author explained, didn’t “overtly [teach] us about patriotism or liberty. He didn’t even teach us about civics or the Constitution. [He] was not a social studies teacher. He was a music teacher…”

  The teacher was Mr. K.

  The columnist was Donald Meyers, the incorrigible kid whom Mr. K never gave up trying to teach to play the violin, whom Mr. K chose to play the devil in Orpheus in the Underworld. “He could be tough,” Donald wrote about Mr. K. “One of the first things he would tell beginners was, ‘Orchestra is not democracy. It is benign dictatorship.’ And some days we wondered about the benign part.”

  But Donald was struck by the fact that for the finale of every annual concert, Mr. K chose a piece “that either celebrated liberty or was by a composer who fought tyranny with music. He encouraged us to learn on our own about these people and their work as a way to better appreciate the music.”

  It was a lesson Donald had carried with him through his career. Years later, I asked him about it. “He taught me you really can’t say the word impossible,” Donald told me. “One thing I learned from Mr. K was don’t let somebody say you can’t do something. He pushed us, but you could sense that he believed in us. He pushed everybody to do better than they thought they could.”

  Despite Mr. K’s best efforts, Donald never did advance very far on the violin. But in the end, he was one of Mr. K’s best students after all.

  19

  Finale

  MELANIE

  My dad is visiting us in Chicago. His hair, or what little is left of it, has turned white, and he’s sporting a goatee. He’s finally given up on his trim mustache and comb-over hairstyle, both of which require too much maintenance. He’s always despised being bald—the Ukrainian phrase for bald translates to “half a rear end on your head.” But in the end, practicality trumps vanity.

  At dinner, he slumps down in his chair, his legs and head bobbing involuntarily. His eyes are unfocused. He seems to be shrinking, getting shorter and weaker. I’ve cooked his favorite meal of chicken and potatoes with green beans. His wife, Joan, who seldom leaves his side, cuts his meat for him.

  We have another dinner guest: one of his old students, Miriam Perkoff, who is in town from California. My dad had spotted her as a little girl and decided she was a perfect fit for the cello. Quiet and shy, by high school Miriam had become a superb musician. She was named principal cellist of All-State Orchestra, then of All-Eastern Orchestra. She went on to study at the Yale School of Music and perform with the Yale Cellos under legendary teacher Aldo Parisot. She is now a professional musician in San Francisco. She’s come to Chicago to work on a project with the violinist Itzhak Perlman.

  At dinner, my dad’s head droops while Miriam and I catch up and compare notes about the music scenes in Chicago and San Francisco. But I can tell she’s distracted, glancing across the table at my father, who doesn’t speak much. As I set out dessert—homemade walnut cake, my dad’s favorite—Miriam fixes her gaze on him.

  “Mr. K,” she starts out, quietly, uncertainly, looking again like the shy teenager she had been decades ago. She takes a breath. “Mr. K, I’ve waited too long to do this.” She tries unsuccessfully to catch my father’s eye. Her own eyes are brimming with tears, and she dabs at them with her napkin.

  “Actually, I’ve wanted to do it for years,” she says, and by now she’s full-on crying. “I’ve been wanting to thank you for all these years. I’ve had this wonderful career. Ever since that day when you told me I had ‘cello hands,’ so my parents let me choose the cello… well, you changed my life. Everything I’ve done since then has been shaped by that moment. I guess what I’m trying to say is thank you. Thank you for my life.”

  My dad looks at Miriam blankly.

  At my front door later that evening, as I hug her good-bye, Miriam drops her voice to a whisper. “I’m not sure he heard me, or understood what I was trying to say. He looks so different.”

  I glance over my shoulder at my dad, still sitting at the table, eating a second piece of cake, paying no attention to us. Then I turn back toward Miriam and give her another hug, promising her that of course he has been following her career for all these years, always with great pride.

  An outdoor lesson with Grandpa: Twins Greg and Laura serenade their grandfather with Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in 2006. Melanie and Stephanie played the same piece together as children.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her as she disappears into the night. “He understood.”

  My father is seventy-nine years old when what I’ve been afraid would happen happens. Too stubborn to allow grab bars to be installed in his home, he suffers a fall in the shower and has to be hospitalized. It’s more than just a fall; it seems as if he has tumbled right off the edge of the earth. Maybe it was some sort of stroke, the doctor tells me, but it’s hard to be sure where the Parkinson’s leaves off and the other problems begin.

  Until that moment, I have been able to convince myself that my father is still there for me to depend on, to go to for advice, to offer support. We still speak regularly on the phone. But deep in my heart, I am coming to terms with the realization that, for a while now, that feeling that my daddy is still there for me is mostly a figment of my imagination.

  In the hospital, my dad tosses in his bed, hallucinating. “Thees cellblock eez where they’re keeping the Ukrainians!” he yells at the orderlies who try to restrain him.

  Days later, he’s transferred to a nursing home, but he’s confused about where he is and why. Phone calls are no longer possible, which I realize when I attempt to play our usual game of “Name That Tune” and find myself humming Scheherazade to the nurse, who has retrieved the telephone because it had fallen out of my father’s weakened grasp. He can no longer hold the phone.

  As often as I can break free of my life in Chicago, I fly to New Jersey to be with him. He still enjoys music and food, both of which I can provide. Usually, I stay with my oldest friend Miriam—now Miriam Cotter—and borrow a violin from her so I won’t have to carry one on the plane. I bring an insulated bag stuffed with ice packs and my dad’s favorite dinner, pyrohy and kielbasa, just like Baba used to make. Baba has only recently died, at 103 years old. She lived at home until the end, mostly because she didn’t have a choice: she got kicked out of a series of nursing homes for attacking the patients and staff.

  When school lets out that summer, I take fifteen-year-old Laura with me to visit. We squeeze into a tiny rental car and head from Newark
down the Garden State Parkway toward the nursing home near the Jersey Shore. We open the windows wide, allowing our lungs to fill with the moist scent of the ocean mixed with exhaust. I can’t help but remember my long ago summer trips along this same road to Long Beach Island. The radio is cranked up all the way, tuned as always to Stephanie’s favorite classic rock station.

  “Nostalgia. Do you know what that word means?” I ask. Laura is preparing for her SATs, keeping a list of new words taped to her mirror so she can study them while she does her hair each morning.

  “I’ve heard it before, but I’m not sure exactly…”

  “This is nostalgia. It’s a feeling, of remembering times gone by, things from the past, this drive, the smell of the air. It’s missing my family…”

  The smells and sounds wash over me, bringing back feelings and memories from when I was a little girl. I remember how it was when my father piled Stephanie and me into the big white Pontiac, when my mother could still walk, and when we would all laugh and listen to classical music that was still brand new to us as we drove down to the shore for a weekend at the beach.

  It reminds me, too, of a more recent, bittersweet memory of visiting my father some months ago, when his health had first started its precipitous decline. It was a misty May night, and the lilacs were blooming as I rounded the ramp off Exit 9 of the New Jersey Turnpike. Driving down Route 18 through East Brunswick, I felt a pang of nostalgia. This town had been my home, the center of my childhood, the place where I shared so many memories with Stephanie and the rest of my family. Now the connection was severed. None of my family members lived here anymore. In fact, there was no reason for me to have even exited the turnpike here, except force of habit.

  On the car radio, song titles slid by on the digital display one after another. As the rain began to fall, the DJ came back on the air, his voice shaking me from my reverie and filling the air. “This next song was requested by Stephanie,” he said.

  A Bon Jovi tune began to play. One of my sister’s favorite groups. A coincidence, surely, I told myself. Still, for some reason that day, long after the song ended, after the next one had already begun, its title remained illuminated on the radio display screen: THANK YOU FOR LOVING ME.

  Thinking back on that day, and on Steph, my father, my mother, and all that was gone, I pause. Then I grab Laura’s hand and press it to my lips. “I’m just so glad I have you, and that you’re here with me now.”

  At the nursing home, my father is agitated. He won’t eat. He keeps trying to get up out of his wheelchair, where he is now confined just as my mother had been for most of her life. “I want to lie down with Stephanie,” he says.

  Laura unpacks her violin and starts to play some Bach for him, which helps a little.

  I hold him and try to soothe him.

  “I haf to get home,” he says, looking at me without recognition. “I haf a sick wife and two leetle girls to take care of! Doesn’t anyone take care of their families anymore?”

  “Daddy, it’s me, Melanie!” I plead. “Don’t you remember Melanie?”

  “Of course I remember Melanie,” he wails. “I just can’t remember the stuff around Melanie.”

  We sit with him for a long time, Laura and I, taking turns playing her violin. Études, Bach, show tunes, Ukrainian folk songs, we play whatever our fingers can remember.

  Slowly, the music calms him. It brings him back.

  Before we leave, I promise to bring back my whole family the next month. “Daddy, next time we come to see you, we’ll all bring our violins. Nicky and Laura and Greg will play, too, and we’ll give a concert for everyone here. How does that sound?”

  “What weel you play?”

  “I don’t know yet. Let’s plan it now.”

  My father is silent for a minute.

  “Just don’t make eet too long,” he says finally, decisively. “You always want to leave your audience wanting more.”

  A month later the whole family comes back with four violins and a viola in tow. We set up in the cafeteria of the dementia ward to perform for the patients, as promised, and to have a small party for my dad, whose eighty-first birthday is approaching. The music soothes some of the patients in the audience, though it agitates almost as many.

  “Hey! Can you turn that goddamn thing down!” an elderly man shouts while we play.

  “When are we gonna eat? I’m hungry!” comes the voice of a woman.

  My three children, accustomed to performing for all sorts of audiences—trained, much as my dad’s students were years ago, to reach out and connect through their music—don’t break stride. After we finish our performance, they circulate through the crowd, letting the sick and elderly touch them and hug them, just as my dad instructed his own students forty years ago.

  “I played one of those when I was young,” one woman says.

  An elderly man in a wheelchair laughs. “My wife always used to drag me to the symphony!”

  One of the old ladies attaches herself to Ed and won’t leave his side, clinging to his arm possessively and giving me an evil look as I whisper in his ear that it’s time to go.

  Leaving the group of patients behind, we wheel my dad down the corridor, to a private room where Ed and the kids have set up a cake. The helium-filled birthday balloons we’ve tied to the back of the wheelchair bob under the fluorescent lights. My dad’s chin sags onto his chest.

  I look at his crippled form, trying to conjure the father who taught me everything I know that’s worth knowing: How to plant a garden, how to choose a hiking stick, how to ride a bike, swim, drive a car, listen to and love music, and play the violin. How to be a caring parent. How to be strong. Together, we faced life’s deepest sorrows and its greatest joys. I can still see us standing next to each other on the highest mountain peaks in the northeast, Mount Katahdin and Mount Washington. I smile as I think of how he used to boil water on the campfire so that I could wash my hair.

  Steph and I used to laugh about how Daddy, who was so over-protective of us at home, would scamper ahead up the sheer rock cliffs like a mountain goat, shouting, “Come on, girls! No turning back, only going forward!” We knew that a mistake could end in death, yet he seemed so unconcerned. I realize now that on those trails he knew he had done all he could to get us ready, that there was nothing more he could do for us short of carrying us piggyback up that mountain, and that he had faith in us and our abilities to do what we had to do without his help. I didn’t understand it then, but it strikes me with sudden clarity now: This was preparation for things to come. He did all he could to get me ready for my life journey, but I alone must make the climb.

  I have so much I want to say to him. But conversation is impossible; he is simply too ill. So instead, I take out my violin and begin to play.

  I have lots of pieces “in my fingers,” so to speak, and could play any one of them. But the piece I choose is “Méditation” from Thaïs, the same mournful composition that he had taught me when I was a little girl and that I had played at my mother’s funeral, then at Stephanie’s memorial. I fear it might disturb him, might bring back painful memories. But I play it because it says everything I some-how cannot: That I love him, and mourn him, and miss him. That I’m grateful for everything he taught me, grateful he has passed along this incredible gift to me that I can now pass along to my own children.

  That he was right: I would thank him someday. That day is today.

  Forcing everything else from my mind, I give myself over to the music and play from my heart, the way my father taught me, letting the music speak for us both.

  As the last harmonic fades away, in the stillness I look over at my father. His head is bent, his eyes closed. For a moment I think he has fallen asleep. But then his eyes flutter open and my father gazes at me, inhaling deeply. It’s as if he is breathing in the music itself.

  Then, softly, gently, my father utters one of the last words he will ever speak to me: “Again.”

  20

  Coda

>   JOANNE

  Just before Thanksgiving, en route home from a World Economic Forum meeting, I checked my e-mail at the Dubai airport and saw an urgent message from our quartet’s old cellist Miriam, half a world away. She had sent it at almost four o’clock in the morning her time.

  The subject line read: “The time has arrived…”

  Her message said that Mr. K had lost his battle with Parkinson’s disease. He had died a few hours before. He was eighty-one. Miriam, a devout mother of five who homeschooled her kids, noted the significance of the date: in the Catholic religion, it was the Feast Day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music. “Could there be any more appropriate send-off for a man who brought the gift of music to hundreds, if not thousands of lives?” she asked.

  I didn’t know anything about saints. But I did know there was something I had to do. After I landed in New York the next day, still bleary and jet-lagged, I tossed my suitcase, unopened, onto my bed and started digging through my closets. I couldn’t remember where I had last stashed my old viola. But I needed to find out.

  I wasn’t the only one. In the days and weeks that followed, the news of Mr. K’s passing traveled from student to student, from one generation to the next, from state to state and across the oceans. The tech executive in Virginia. The musician in San Francisco. The writer in Utah. Through Facebook and texts and e-mail came the call: it was time for us—Mr. K’s students and colleagues—to play one final concert together, this time for him.

  The outpouring took me by surprise. Mr. K was the toughest teacher we ever had. He could be downright mean. If he was teaching today, he wouldn’t stand a chance. Parents would be outraged. They’d be calling and complaining. They’d yell at the principal if he singled out their kid for playing out of tune. They’d call a lawyer if he suggested their child was “deaf” or an “idyot.” Administrators would be pressured to fire him. Almost surely they would.