by Toby Devens
Oh God no, oh God no, oh God . . .
“He mentioned you by name . . . requested that you two perform the ‘Meditation’ from Thaïs.”
“Beautiful selection. Perfect.” Ernie was already flexing his fingers.
“This Friday?” I said, wondering if I committed suicide before the funeral, could they double up on the service? Boxed, with dirt shoveled over me, was looking pretty good about now.
“Correct. I understand the Jewish religion dictates that funerals be held as quickly as possible. But Richard had close friends around the world who will want to pay their respects. Sarah felt she needed to give them the time to get here. Yo-Yo is coming in from Paris.”
“Really?” Ernie said, darting me a meaningful look.
“She thinks Lucian Landau will be flying in from Israel. He’s trying to rearrange his schedule. Some of the best musicians on the planet will be sitting in those seats.”
A month earlier, no big deal. I’d played with Yo-Yo, Lucian—name the best and the brightest and they’d guested with the Maryland Philharmonic. That teddy bear Slava Rostropovich liked to high-five me, rest his soul. I’d never been intimidated by the big guns. But now, with posttraumatic stress or whatever they called this seizure of confidence, my heart actually did falter a beat or two.
“Sarah says the synagogue has a stage that could house the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So Richard could have asked for the orchestra. Or he could have requested Vijay.” Angela was right—the “Meditation” was written for violin and our concertmaster was the logical choice. “But he specifically wanted you two, close friends as well as colleagues. That’s a lovely tribute. An honor.”
Oh God.
Ernie tried to look grim, but I felt his pride seeping out. I was also seeping. Little sweat beads of panic from every pore.
Come on, Richard—I sent my entreaty to heaven—this is my inheritance? Abject terror?
“The Thaïs shouldn’t be a problem for either of you. You can work out any kinks when you run through it together. Judith, just make sure you don’t rush those quarter notes around four minutes in. There’s a tendency to push. And watch the level of intensity. Remember, this is meditative. You don’t want to turn it into a tearjerker. No soap opera, please.” Her voice had turned schoolmarm and she was talking to a spot over my head.
I nodded mechanically, wondering if there were enough Inderal in the world.
After she dashed off, Ernie said, “Think she’s on edge? ‘No soap opera, please.’ Don’t take it personally. She’s got this bastard of a board meeting in an hour, when she’s going to announce that the North Korea trip’s—” He stopped. “Why the blank stare? You’re telling me you didn’t know about Korea? If so, you’re the last.”
Of course Richard’s secret was out. Every orchestra was a hive of gossip. “I heard the rumor,” I admitted.
“We all heard the rumor. Angela was delusional if she thought she could keep something this huge under wraps. One leak and le deluge. So we got pumped up for it and now it’s hit a major snag and she’s got to inform the board we may not go to Pyongyang after all. That on top of Richard’s passing. A helluva day for her. For all of us.”
“What’s the snag?” Why did I think I wasn’t going to like the answer?
“Something about one of the musicians and a background check is what I picked up.”
Uh-oh. “You know who?”
He shrugged. “The only thing I can come up with is we’ve got twelve people in the orchestra who weren’t born in the States. Maybe their papers are screwed up. You were born here, right?”
“In Brooklyn.”
“There you go. Foreign country.” He patted my back. “Seriously. It’s all political stuff, way beyond us mere musicians. And Angela’s laundry list for the Thaïs? Just go with the flow. Don’t overthink it, Judith.”
• • •
“But you overthink everything,” Geoff pointed out when I told him. “Now you’ve got the notion that the snag in the Korean project is you.”
“Who else? It’s only Lyndon Shin and me who have Korean connections. And he’s thirty-three and was born in Seoul. My mother’s family was from the north. She could have lied on her application to get into the U.S. In fact, my father must have filled it out, so I’d make book they lied. That could be the holdup.”
“Or maybe it isn’t.”
“I’m hoping. But Angela was—I don’t know—cool to me this afternoon. I had the feeling she’d rather Richard had chosen someone else to play the Thaïs. Anyone else.” I blew a puff of anxiety. “Me too, actually.”
“Well, you owe it to the poor sod.” Geoff was losing patience. Not that I blamed him.
Marti had her own brand of advice for my jitters. “I’m going to tell you what my mama used to tell me when I got the heebie-jeebies about speaking my piece in Sunday school. She’d say, ‘Martha-boo, imagine your audience stark naked. Or sitting on the commode.’ Okay, can you imagine Yo-Yo Ma . . .”
And Charlie said . . . Well, for two days nothing from Charlie. On the third, a strange e-mail popped up about a house in Georgetown on the market and would I check out the listing online. “Since you and I may be living there someday, I’d value your approval.”
Typical Charlie bait, I recognized from our time back in Cambridge. He’d toss out that stuff to test his own feelings. You couldn’t make too much of it.
Still, under my normal neurotic circumstances, it would have fueled sleepless nights. Now it would have to get to the back of the obsession line behind the clear front-runner: how I was going to get through a five-minute piece at Richard Tarkoff’s funeral with two hundred world-class musicians in a position to titter, mutter, and (I could actually picture this in my twisted psyche) out-and-out heckle me. I could see—really, I could envision his frizzy halo in full quiver—the generally amiable conductor Zigmund Manheim launching one razzmatazz of a Bronx raspberry as I drew my last stroke ever on the cello’s E-string.
Save me, O God of my forefathers.
Chapter 31
Within minutes of Sarah Tarkoff’s call to Angela, the orchestra’s public relations and development departments leapt into action. Although at first the crassness of it made me cringe, I had to admit they brainstormed a brilliant coup. They turned the following evening’s open rehearsal into a fund-raiser, a tribute to Richard that would bring tears to donors’ eyes and pens to their checkbooks. “As he would have wanted it,” an internal memo tried to persuade his colleagues.
Knowing Richard, I figured he may well have gotten a kick out of being made into a shill postmortem. And you couldn’t expect PR to just ride out this perfect storm of opportunity, luck, and schmaltz. This was an event loaded with the Phil’s most generous benefactors.
A few times a year they were invited to sit in as the orchestra rehearsed that weekend’s program. It was a thank-you-for-your-support, you’re-one-of-us occasion. The civilians loved open rehearsals. They got to watch the musicians screw up and cut up a little, and they got a taste of Angela’s dry wit as she buffed us to a shine. Nobody loved to schmooze an audience more than Angela, or did it better. And nobody picked a donor’s pocket with a more elegant sleight of hand.
The full-press court began in the lobby, where traditionally the guests sipped champagne and nibbled refreshments. We musicians circulated among them, glad-handing and making small talk, an exercise in forced intimacy that supposedly translated into more funding dollars.
Then, suddenly, the unexpected. The crowd hushed as Angela stepped front and center to announce that the evening was dedicated to the memory of—flourishing off the velvet drape over the easeled portrait of Richard in his prime—a shining light with the orchestra for more than four decades. Our principal cellist had passed away the day before, expressing a final wish that his beloved Maryland Philharmonic live long and prosper. “And so we are hereby establishing the Richard Ar
thur Tarkoff Foundation for Capital Improvements.” (Ah, electronic eye toilets for the ladies’ rooms.) It was a brilliant Lazarus moment that generated a rumble of sympathy and a collective nod of support.
In the past, I’d enjoyed working the reception with the orchestra groupies, but tonight swamping the undertow of grief were huge surges of gut-wrenching fear at the prospect of performing solo at Richard’s funeral, an obsession best tended in private. (I could almost hear him tsk-tsking like a metronome in his coffin.) So my plan was to track a single figure eight through the crowd and head backstage. It was the last loop that snared me.
“Judith, over here. Here, Judith!” a familiar voice rang out, really rang, loud enough to temporarily dampen the chatter in the immediate vicinity. I stared at the woman who’d swept into my path, the one with the alien hairdo, a stranger wrapped in a purple jersey Diane Von Furstenberg rip-off as she metamorphosed into my mother.
“You surprise?” she asked, gold teeth gleaming. “I tell you she surprise, honey.”
The honey was Irwin Raphael, looking as out of place as the pope at a klezmer concert.
“Winnie Chang donate much money all the time. She get invite but can’t go. So she say, you take two ticket, Grace. Korean girl play. You like very much.”
Our guest artist that week was Melanie Rhee, the talented young Korean-American violinist. Nice of Winnie. Stupid of me not to think of inviting my mother.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Irwin said as he slipped my mother’s hand in his.
Really? The few seventy-eight records he’d left behind in Brooklyn when he’d rushed off to pursue the chippie were of Sinatra, Ella, and Benny Goodman. These days, judging from the way he dressed, like a Jewish cowboy—that night in a plaid sport jacket with a bolo—I figured he liked country music. So this had to have been a reach for him.
“Winnie have much culture,” my mother said. “Me, only when you play. But tonight I like, I think. You make duet with Korean girl, Judith?”
“No, Uhm-mah. She’s playing solo, but the orchestra will be accompanying her.”
Decibel level soaring, my mother announced to the neighborhood, “Judith play solo many night. Associate principal. Soon be principal. Highest cello in orchestra. My daughter make me very, very proud.”
My accomplishments had always given her what my aunt Phyllis called nachas—proprietary pleasure. Grace had boasted about my first job, a part-time gig in a small-town orchestra, with as much gusto as she would about my later work with a major symphony. She really loved me for whatever I was.
She looked around to see if the immediate world was taking that in. “Ah, look near stairway.” She waved. “Selma Frommer, Blumen House 7B. Such snob.” She extracted her hand from Irwin’s and pushed her nose into a snooty pug. “I need to say hello and brag too.” Her eyes twinkled. “She always brag on her son, the big, famous doctor. Now my turn. Be right back. No more wine for you, Irwin. Two glass enough.” She darted off.
I heard a hum come from my father, as if he were revving up to get through a conversation with me on his own. He began on a high note.
“She’s a pip, your mother.” His eyes followed her and his lips curled in a smile at the sight. “In her golden years, she’s an outgoing person. Who would’ve thought she’d turn out this way? Not that I don’t like it. That’s what I saw of her personality when I met her. But then, when she came here, she hardly spoke English and she was shy as a cat. A totally different woman. And now she’s back to the version of her I met in Seoul.” He shook his head so the pompadour shimmered ebony in the lobby light. “Amazing how getting older changes you. Makes you better sometimes.”
Was he leading into a commercial for the new and improved Irwin Raphael? If so, it would take a money-back guarantee to make me buy it.
One look at my caveat emptor face and he hitched his neck in the direction of Richard’s portrait. “Sorry about your partner. Eight years younger than me. Poor bastard. Excuse my French, but your mom said he suffered a lot. In and out of the hospital.” He fiddled with his bolo clasp in the shape of steer horns. “Personally, I hope I get hit by a bus.”
A pregnant pause as I silently seconded the motion.
“I seen so many hospitals with Lorna. The late Mrs. Raphael. Lupus is a hell of a disease. She was in more than out in the last few years. ‘Don’t let me die in the hospital,’ she always begged me. I promised she’d die at home. Another promise I didn’t keep.”
That lassoed my attention. We were heading down some yellow brick road here. Where it was winding I couldn’t yet tell.
“Her sister called an ambulance near the end. Jesus, I hate hospitals.”
At which point I found my Oz. “Is that why you didn’t come to see me when I had the aneurysm?”
“Wha?” His jaw literally dropped.
This thought had been nudging me since Irwin had reentered our lives.
“You had to have known. If not through Mom, through Aunt Phyllis. You think people get better with age? My aneurysm was only a year ago, I could have died, and you still didn’t show up.”
“Now just one cotton-pickin’ minute, kiddo. The hospital’s not why—” he began.
“I don’t tell him.” My mother, whose timing was as good as any musician’s, had threaded her way back. Now she edged in, facing me. “And I tell Aunt Phyllis to keep big mouth shut. Why? I tell you why. Chippie . . . Lorna very sick when you sick. Lupus make very bad time for her.”
Grace laid a consoling hand on my father’s arm. “And if I tell him you have aneurysm, he come run, run, run. For what? I know you won’t see him. If I tell you, you be so mad. It make you more sick to see your daddy here. So I don’t tell and I make Aunt Phyllis swear she don’t tell.”
He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known.
Just then, my watch alarm sounded and, as if the timer had set it off, my chest began to ache. Not the breathless clutch of anxiety. I knew the difference. And though I was swept by a cold sweat, not a heart attack. This, I suspected, was an event that would never show up on any cardiogram. A piercing of that membrane I’d toughened to protect my emotional center. Just a tiny puncture, but it hurt like hell.
Or it could have been gas.
“The orchestra is starting to warm up. I’ve got to go,” I said just to my mother as the chest pain ebbed.
Her other hand flew out to capture my elbow. “When Irwin and I begin e-mail, I talk about you many things. Now back here, he get so upset when you have even little headache. He think your aneurysm come back. He go crazy, your father. He worry about you. He love you.”
“Can we discuss this later, please?” I asked, needing air and my arm.
Even in the lobby, I could latch onto the muted sound of the musicians warming up onstage. The program was all-Prokofiev. I wanted to hear the carefree youth of Juliet in the Suite No. 2. That the runaway who messed up my youth loved me, this I didn’t want to hear.
“Go.” Grace freed me. “We eat at Matsuri restaurant after concert. You father say he don’t like sushi but I like, so he eat it now. You come with us tonight. We eat, we talk.”
The idea of a reconciliation supper with the old man turned my stomach more than squid sashimi.
“Sorry, Uhm-mah. I can’t. I’m playing at Richard’s funeral tomorrow and I need to practice with the pianist after the rehearsal.”
I’d booked a half hour with Ernie after the stage cleared, one last session to make sure we were in sync with the “Meditation.” Then home to go over and over my mistakes, real and imagined, and count down the hours until F-Day: Friday, funeral, fuck up. Take your choice. Take all three.
“Maybe tomorrow,” my mother said. “After you come back from cemetery, I make us lunch. Yes, Irwin?”
Take four, if you counted my father.
My father, my father. I thought and rethought the new, unmodified word as I h
urried off, leaving them silent behind me. Now that I had a father, what was I supposed to do with him?
Chapter 32
Richard Tarkoff, rest his soul, made his final appearance before a packed house. And what a house! Temple Beth Zion, a standout even in the cluster of designer synagogues on Park Heights Avenue, was a Walter Gropius paean to—well, whatever it was that Independent-Progressive-Reconstructionist Jews believed.
It took me five minutes to navigate the huge, crowded art nouveau lobby that could have passed for the first-class salon on the QE2 in its heyday. And then there was a queue to sign the guestbook. When I finally got to the front, I thumbed through the preceding pages wanting to see who would be in the seats for the service. I swallowed a lump of fear as I found the sprawling, flourishing signatures of musical giants: Wasserstein, Sundergard. Lermontov, Chumsky. It would be just Ernie and me up there playing before the crème de la crème, a thought that sent my pulse rocketing. But soothingly, just above the line left empty for me to sign, Aunt Doris and Uncle Lester Rosenberg had written, “Richard, you were an inspiration to us all. Truly a man for all seasons.” Truly.
I was bent over the page, about to add a bravado curlicue to the R in Raphael, when an arpeggio of prickles ran down my spine. I swear I felt her before I heard her. And then I did hear that unmistakable loud, grating voice that was chalk on blackboard to me. And the fake international accent. She was from Borough Park, Brooklyn, for God’s sake. Eloise Flint. My nemesis from the New England Conservatory. My replacement in Charlie Pruitt’s bed. Thief of honors in the Balakirev competition. A woman who could vacuum all the air from a room in a single sweep.
I checked and, damn, there she was off to my right, maybe twenty pounds heavier than the airbrushed book jacket photo, but definitely Eloise in a weird brown-striped caftan thing and too much artsy-craftsy jewelry. She was nodding like a parrot peck-peck-pecking as the violinist Lucian Landau whispered at her side. Then her beady avian eyes locked on my gaze, she waited a beat, and she waved. Not a socially acceptable full-handed dash of a hi, but an affected flutter to show off her superior fingering, I supposed.