In a typical at-home scenario, I would emerge from a studio practice session, and Morrie would be reading. I’d say something cheerful to him; he’d look up and say, “As you can see, I’m reading,” or just, “I’m reading,” and then go back to his material. It was his answer to all that practicing I insisted on doing. I understood both the subliminal message and the underlying problem, but had no solution.
A revelatory moment came one evening while my close friends were on vacation. I had a performance in the Santa Monica area, the kind of event that Amelia and sometimes Eve would drive me to, if they possibly could, and then stay for the concert. They both knew that my arms and hands had a limited amount of endurance, and that it would ease that situation if someone else drove me to the venue.
I had explained all of this to Morrie many times, telling him how much it helped when someone drove me to performances. But as I got ready to leave, I could see that he hadn’t dressed to go with me. I put my dress bag with gown and shoes in the hallway, where he could see it clearly. Then I went back to get my smaller bag containing various supplies, such as emergency calories, fix-it for broken skin, hair spray, handkerchiefs, etc.—whatever I might need during the evening.
When I got back to the front hallway, I explained what was in the smaller bag, too, a casual-sounding attempt to ease the conversation. He scarcely looked up from his reading when I mentioned that I had to get these things down to the car, then had to be on my way to the venue early. As he knew, I would need to try the piano before the audience got there. But Morrie didn’t budge. No offer to drive me there; not even a move to carry the dress bag and other gear down to the car.
I tried one last time, mentioning that my shoulders were not in great shape—something of an understatement. Still no response. So I made my way downstairs with the dress bag and then came back for the other one. Morrie looked up just long enough to wave goodbye. When I left, mingled with my usual pre-performance nervousness was a bleak feeling. I wondered what was happening to this relationship.
When I came back to the apartment, still flushed with the adrenaline of performance, Morrie didn’t even ask how the concert had gone. That was the moment when I finally became aware that something was fundamentally wrong between us, and that I hadn’t truly felt the full extent of it until that evening. First, Morrie had resented my piano work in the studio. Then, he had begun to resent my going off to teach or perform. Finally, he had begun to resent me.
Things went downhill from there. We didn’t have much to say during our last conversations while we were living together. Everything had already been said. Morrie had already commented enough on my unavailability when I went into my studio. He had expressed his unhappiness that I was always accepting tour dates, auditions, interviews, and, more recently, the teaching job. I had commented enough on my dismay that he felt that way. And I had said many times that I wished he could understand why I couldn’t bypass those opportunities for which I had waited so long.
I felt tearful on the fateful day when Morrie moved his things out. After he had left, I sat in great sadness, finally moving around slowly and weeping while I aimlessly rearranged my things in bureau drawers and closets.
After a few weeks of unhappy silence on both sides, Morrie called to see if I would like to get together for dinner at The Sea Lion. I accepted, and we discovered, to our surprise, that we could still enjoy dating if we weren’t living together. The chemistry was still there, once we had been freed from his resentment and my resulting distress. And when he stayed overnight, we both understood that he would be leaving the next morning, like a guest.
The eventual divorce was amicable, though sad. Morrie’s sister, Mary, who was devoted to him, stayed in touch and seemed to understand how I felt. Eve and Amelia gave me a lot of support, though every so often Eve would remind me that she had never thought it would work.
Chapter Fourteen
Hope Hopkins and the Second Miracle
I plunged into preparations for upcoming concert tours, and also began spending more time in my two-piano studio at Immaculate Heart College. My students and I were taking full advantage of the chance to rehearse concerto repertoire there, since orchestral reductions could be played on the second piano. Amelia and Eve grew concerned about how much my work schedule had escalated, and in the evenings, encouraged me to relax and enjoy the end of my day. Amelia would tell me jokingly that it was time to “stop tilling the fields,” one of her references to my family’s farming background.
The IHC music students were a diverse group from convent and monastic life, Catholic, or public school backgrounds. They were all attracted to the small, flexible, and active music department. Their performance levels varied from a pre-college program—which Mary Mark had initiated—to graduate proficiency. Brother Salvatore, a graduate-level student, was teaching piano at a Catholic school and wanted to increase his performance skills. Valerie, a precocious fourteen-year-old in the pre-college program, was my first-ever blind student.
Since Valerie taped our lessons on her cassette recorder, I would play in slow motion any piece she was working on, giving her something that she could replay at home to help her memorize the music more easily. I would stop the slow-motion flow to arpeggiate a chord—spread out, or roll, the chord, starting with the lowest note—when I thought it would help her to identify every note.
Valerie felt very secure once she had learned a piece. Since she read the Braille sheet music with her fingers, and memorized as she went along, she had committed a musical work firmly to memory by the time she could play it through. She could start cold anywhere in a piece—a skill I had learned to prize. I encouraged her to keep thinking through, in slow motion, any work she was going to perform. Valerie said she enjoyed doing that; to her, it felt like a meditation.
It was a challenge to help Valerie with her technical approach to the piano. She felt safest feeling her way around the keyboard, in motions that resembled crawling. So I tried practicing with my eyes closed, to determine how secure I could be without visual help, while still giving my hands plenty of playing space. I figured that if I could sense spaces at the keyboard with my rebuilt playing mechanism, then someone with normal hands and arms should be able to do the same. I came up with some “interval jumping” exercises that I thought might give Valerie more freedom, and she tailored them to what she could do. She said it was akin to what they were teaching her at the Braille Institute, a technique called “walking in space,” in which she was learning to sense spaces rather than always feeling her way around a room.
When Valerie performed, she would turn her head toward the audience while playing and smile broadly through most of a piece. I explained that the sighted audience, used to seeing performers face straight ahead, might be distracted from her musical message and might not take her playing as seriously as she deserved. So we rehearsed a more conventional head position.
When Valerie played her first full solo recital program, she was “walking in space” to and from the piano, giving her hands space at the keyboard, and saving her happy grins for between pieces. It was a wonderful evening for Valerie and for everyone who knew her.
In one of the student group sessions, I asked Valerie to show the college students how she had to learn. I could describe my own careful preparation, of course, but thought it would be more fun for everyone, including Valerie, if she could demonstrate this technique herself.
As my relationship with the students developed, it turned into an interesting give-and-take. Just as teaching had always been integrated into the rest of my life when I was in my teens, it was developing that way at IHC.
I was always willing to give students extra time. And many of them were eager to help me in whatever ways they could. Sometimes one of my students would drive out to Malibu to pick me up for a day at the college, and then another student would drive me back home. They enjoyed coming out to Malibu for some of their lessons. On occasion, someone who needed to talk through a personal m
atter with a professional came out for a lesson late in the day, or even on a weekend, so that he or she could go next door to Amelia’s apartment for a therapy session.
This was in many ways an ideal arrangement—incorporating music and pertinent deep conversation into everyday life, in a natural flow of people helping each other and drawing on whatever skills and insights were available. Amelia also had conferences with faculty members from time to time, once some of them became aware of that potential.
Amelia’s manner was always so relaxed that the students felt partly as if they were just talking with a friend. For a short and casual session, she didn’t charge them anything, and for a longer session it was still on a generous basis.
April of that year (1968) was memorable for a tragic event in American history, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The day it happened, Amelia, Eve, and I sat together in a state of shock during the evening, watching the televised reports of the horrific news.
The next morning, as Amelia was preparing to leave for work as usual, Eve and I pleaded with her to stay home. She was the only white person who worked at Lathrop, which was right in the middle of the Watts ghetto. Terrible riots had broken out in Watts less than three years earlier. Now, with full awareness, she was choosing to walk into the middle of intense anger, and therefore danger.
We both begged her not to go, insisting that everyone she worked with at Lathrop would understand. But Amelia simply said, with quiet determination, “This, of all days, is the day I must be there.” When she drove away, Eve and I both felt sick, fearing that we might never see her again.
Later, Amelia’s staff members and colleagues reported that everyone had been astonished—some described it as horrified—when she walked into her office that morning. But they were also deeply touched that she took such a risk to be with them on that day of grieving.
When Amelia got back home to Malibu that evening, she told us that probation officers who worked with her regularly had insisted on escorting her safely out of the area at the end of the afternoon.
We also heard for a long time afterward how word had spread in Watts that Amelia had come to work that day. She was right; her act of solidarity had a lasting effect in that community, even at such a turbulent time.
Only two months later we were rocked to the core once again by the shocking news that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel, in the heart of Los Angeles. At about that same time, I took what appeared to be a step backward. Evidently the mix of teaching, classes, faculty activities, touring dates, and ongoing careful preparation for solo and concerto performances was proving to be too much for some of my weakest muscles. I had a sudden “shoulder attack” in which my right shoulder—the good shoulder, yes, but with serious weak spots—started screaming at me in pain.
My usual stretches, ice packs, and other ongoing preventive measures hadn’t been effective enough. My medical team termed it a serious strain, and advised me to take time out for intensive treatment, including diathermy, electrotherapy, physical therapy, and finally, an extensive course of prednisone. Fortunately, I could have some of this treatment at the clinic just up the road in Malibu. And since I didn’t have much on my performance calendar for the summer, only a few appearances had to be canceled.
The course of prednisone brought daily highs and lows, a frightening combination when mixed with natural adrenaline once I played a few concert dates in the fall. My “performance nerves” were heightened and the “post-performance letdowns” more severe. As the prednisone course tapered off, my overall energy level sagged, and I felt myself pushing through each day.
I resumed the pre-shoulder-attack schedule carefully and gradually, but even so, my right shoulder again started to cry out. Hoping to reverse this development as quickly as possible, I made an immediate trip to the Malibu clinic for some more in-office physical therapy.
The therapist that day, whom I hadn’t met before, smiled and introduced herself as Hope Hopkins. She had brown bobbed hair, a direct gaze that seemed to take in everything at once, and a way of speaking that identified her as hailing from Maine. To my surprise, Hope asked detailed questions about my original polio attack and specific experiences in the thirteen years since. Toward the end of the treatment, she mentioned some exercises that might help me.
My guard immediately went up, as I had taken this journey before and felt that I couldn’t face another approach at that moment, especially since the prednisone had left me with a low energy level.
“I have a lot of exercises that I do regularly,” I assured her politely. Hope didn’t press further, and we made an appointment for our next in-office session. But that evening, once I had rested and done some breathing with the tide, I wondered if I had made a mistake by dismissing Hope’s suggestion.
“What’s the matter with me?” I asked Amelia, as we discussed Hope’s suggestion over dinner. “Here’s someone with real interest, some detailed knowledge, and perhaps a different approach. Why didn’t I at least let her explain?”
Amelia well understood why my first response was something like “Please, not again!” But she also encouraged me to explore whatever Hope’s approach might be.
So during our next therapy session, I asked Hope, “About those exercises you were mentioning? I’d like to hear more.”
She smiled and began to ask for more details about my post-polio experiences. Then Hope told me that she had been a physical therapist at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey, California, a facility that had developed a particularly effective therapeutic program to help patients deal with post-polio effects. Since the polio vaccine had been in use for some fifteen years by then, the volume of new cases had decreased sharply, but post-polio patients still came from all over the country to consult the therapists there.
My chance meeting with Hope suddenly took on a whole new dimension. After we had finished the passive treatment, she did a few muscle tests, resembling those I had undergone many times. She notated the “scores” for various muscles and muscle groups, just as the doctors and therapists in Copenhagen had done.
Then she put down her clipboard, looked me in the eye, and said, in her down-home Maine accent, “Uh, and yuhr-ah a . . . pianist?” I nodded. “Uh, I’d like to see you play sometime.” I had to laugh. She might as well have said “This I gotta see!”
“Well, I live just down the road,” I replied. “I’d be happy to play for you.” To my surprise she immediately accepted, and we set a time for the next day.
In the late afternoon, Hope appeared promptly, and we went right to my studio. I had put a chair in the best place for her to hear the music, but she moved it a little so that she could see every upper body movement. Then, just before I began to play, she ordered, “Take your shirt off.” I started unbuttoning my blouse. “You can keep your bra on,” she reassured me, then added, “OK, go ahead and play.”
I felt ridiculous sitting there playing Beethoven in my bra, as Hope watched for a while, looking at my right side, then sat down on the floor peering up at me. Next, she crawled on her hands and knees under the piano, a necessary move since there wasn’t enough space to walk around behind me. When she reached the other side, she peered up at me at various angles from the floor. Then she stood up and shifted to a position slightly behind me, so she could see my left side from a different angle. Finally, she crawled back under the piano to the “audience position” and said, right in the middle of a musical passage, “OK, that’s enough.”
Obviously, Hope was not a music lover.
“Well,” she said, “I see how you’re doing it.”
“How I’m doing what?” I asked, since I was doing several complicated things.
“For one thing, your left hand,” she explained. “You’re throwing your wrist.”
“My wrist?” I asked. “I thought you said I don’t have much in my left wrist!”
“Well, you don’t,” she said, “but it’s the best thing yo
u’ve got.”
And with that pronouncement, Hope initiated exploration of a new treatment program.
Just as I’d learned in Copenhagen ten years before, I had unknowingly been straining my damaged muscles. I had continued the preventive measures that the Copenhagen team had set up for me, but Hope said that even so, I had developed muscle contractures—the shortening of muscle fiber due to a combination of weakness and overuse.
Hope explained, much as Nybo had a decade earlier, that these contractures were part of my perceived strength. Once again, they had to be eased before she could proceed with any new exercises. Her treatments to relieve some of the contractures that had developed since Copenhagen exposed my actual weakness to a surprising degree.
Once we had finished the therapy course at the Malibu clinic, Hope came to my apartment for the one-on-one and across-the-table exercises, just as I had with Nybo in the Blegdam Hospital basement. But the exercises Hope brought, and the ones she dreamed up for me to do on the days in between sessions, were unlike anything I had ever experienced.
These new exercises, known as PNF patterns (proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation), had been refined for use with post-polio patients at Rancho Los Amigos. Hope had been in on the ground floor with that program.
Most of the rehabilitative resistive exercises I had done before meeting Hope were in vertical or horizontal patterns. The PNF patterns were diagonal. This simple but brilliant change encouraged the patient’s remaining motor neurons to participate in different ways from anything the “straight” horizontal or vertical patterns could elicit. Those remaining neurons seemed encouraged to jump into the fray as soon as they discovered more ways to help.
I felt the response in the larger muscles first—those affecting the bigger, broader movements. And then the larger muscles in turn began to pour more potential into the wrists, hands, and fingers. The hands and fingers then had to respond, with the wrists as a kind of fulcrum. Each development brought a different balance and impulse into the hands and fingers. Hope also gave my hands and fingers their own diagonal exercises that corresponded to those for the arms and shoulders.
To Play Again Page 21