Adrianne Geffel

by David Hajdu

  You may be aware of historical accounts of the way Einstein could do mathematics before he could talk. Ted Williams could run before he could walk. I cannot personally verify those particular things—I never had the opportunity to meet Einstein or Ted Williams when they were infants. I never knew either of them at any age. Yet, I did have the opportunity to know my daughter. I heard her humming beautiful music before she spoke a word of English. Some individuals might contend that some of it was not beautiful, per se. Yet, it was music to my ears, because it was music made by my daughter, and I heard it with my own ears.

  Both my wife Carolyn and myself were surprised by Adrianne’s reaction to her music, at the juncture when she had the opportunity to hear it for herself. My brother Bobber—you should put his name down as Robert, to have it legally—Bobber gave us some assistance in this regard in 1961 or ’62—Adry was approximately two years of age. Bobber was in the sales field, in wholesale fabric. He was the Romeo in the family. Still is. At this point in time, he was recently divorced from his first wife, Rosemary—divorced or legally separated. It was legal for him to be dating at this point, finally. As you can imagine, he had the opportunity to meet quite a few women in the fabric industry—designers and so forth. He was keeping company with a young lady who was known to have a roommate—or a sister or a cousin, I can’t be held to all the fine points of this—and the roommate or sister or what-have-you worked in the business office of the county hospital. They had a tape recorder in the hospital, for some reason. I suppose they had a recording of last rites that they could play if a patient wasn’t going to make it and a priest couldn’t get there in time. My brother was very resourceful, which did get him in some trouble with his wives. This time, it was all for the good. He arranged to borrow the tape recorder and lugged it to our house so we could record Adry humming one of her songs. Bobber told me we could keep the tape recorder if we would like, but it didn’t quite work out to record Adry, and we returned the machine to him. I suspect he still has it, if you’re interested to see it. It was a Grundig, portable but could also work through the household AC current. It came from Germany, like my family.

  Carolyn and Bobber and I—and, I believe, Bobber’s girlfriend, who became his second wife—set it up on the floor of the living room, in the far corner Adry used to enjoy. Adry took a look at it and inched back against the wall and stared at it. Bobber turned it on, and the tape reels started to spin. Adry was fascinated by that—you know how kids like gadgets, especially when they have a pair of spinning reels on top? I got quite a charge out of it myself. Adry studied it and started to hum a happy song. We got it on tape, and Bobber pressed the stop button when she stopped. The tape is still with Bobber, in a whole collection of things from Adry’s very early days of making music that Bobber organized for safekeeping.

  The trouble began when we played the tape back through the recorder. As soon as Adrianne heard that, she started to cry. She didn’t stop until we turned the tape recorder off.

  Carolyn Geffel:

  I was sitting with her in the kitchen one day in the afternoon—it was a Monday, I know that, because Monday was the day we paid the paperboy. I had her on my lap, and I was feeding her. She was on baby food then—no more bottle—so I can date this for you at around 1960 or very early 1961, probably. Everything was calm, when all of a sudden Adry started to wail. I mean wail. She spit up all her mushy strained carrots all over me. I had on a black house dress that I wore rather often. It was a pale blue print when I bought it, and then when it started to fade, I dyed it to get more wear out of it. Black dye covers the best. I was a frugal homemaker—my parents taught me that, by their bad example. They could never handle their money. That’s why I ended up so good with numbers. I do all the bookkeeping for our propane business, as you know, and I built up a somewhat impressive wardrobe of black clothes that I dyed at one time or another. On occasion, when I was in town, I’d be mistaken for Amish, if I wasn’t smoking.

  Adry was wailing, and I had orange spew all over my black dress—I looked like a Halloween decoration. She was crying so hard that I didn’t realize somebody had been knocking on the screen door. The paperboy was there, and he needed me to pay him for the deliveries for the week. Ordinarily, he would just toss the paper onto the back porch. But on Mondays, he was looking to be paid. Tommy Fermonti was the paperboy then—good-looking boy, like all the Fermontis, and probably a bit of a handful at school, if he was anything like his brothers. He never gave us any trouble, except for making Adry cry when he came to the door.

  The next Monday, the same thing happened: Adry burst out crying, and don’t you know it, Tommy Fermonti’s at the door. This time, I happen to notice that he was playing his transistor radio. It caught my attention, because “Mama Said” was playing, by the Shirelles, and I liked the Shirelles. That was when I started to put things together, and I realized it wasn’t Tommy Fermonti that was making Adry cry. It was his radio. She just couldn’t stand the sound of the music. It wasn’t just “Mama Said,” either—everyone has the right to their own taste in music. Greg never cared much for the Shirelles, and that’s his prerogative as a person who doesn’t know much about music. With Adry, the problem was music in general—all music, or the sound of it.

  Nina Oberheimer (music teacher, Venango County School District):

  My name is Nina Gaylor Oberheimer, and I held responsibility for music education in the public school system in Venango County, Pennsylvania, from 1956 to 1986. I graduated from Clarion State Teacher’s College in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in 1955, and began my career in education the following year. As I always say, I heard that Clarion call! In my capacity as the music educator for Venango County, I taught all the various instruments—woodwinds, brass, string instruments, and percussion, as well as piano and voice, and, yes, to be clear, I do consider the human voice an instrument. I did this for students in all grade levels—K through 8 and up through high school—in the nine elementary schools and two high schools in the district. If you lived in the county for any period in that thirty-year time frame and ever took up a musical instrument in school, I was your teacher. And I hope you’ve been practicing!

  I have a policy of not singling out individual students for praise or criticism. It’s too easy to hurt people’s feelings and too hard to remember all their names. That being said, I cannot deny that Adrianne Geffel stands out as the most memorable student I have ever had the pleasure to teach. I’ve had some who are no pleasure, I do admit.

  I first became acquainted with Adrianne before she entered school. At the recommendation of her family physician, whom, as I recall, was Dr. Kozcak, the late Dr. Kozcak, I was asked to meet Adrianne and make a professional evaluation of her musical ability. I made a visit to the Geffels’ home out on the old Route 6. Although I had been to the location on a few earlier occasions, to purchase propane, I had never before been inside the residential area and never before spoke to either of Adrianne’s parents about anything other than my home fuel needs. This was also the first time I ever met the young man of the house, Donny, whom I would have for trumpet lessons for several weeks during his high-school years. The day must have been a Saturday, when I was free from my school duties and available for an extra-curricular adventure such as this. Donny, who was home from school, as well, greeted me at the door, in a manner, and scurried off to fetch his parents from their office on the side of the house. They brought me to join Adrianne in the parlor, where she was sitting blissfully next to one of the chairs, humming to herself.

  I listened with great interest to the melody Adrianne was producing, and it was charming. It was clear to me immediately this was a child with an exceptional musical memory. She displayed a high degree of ability to retain music she had apparently heard in the house—an ability all people have, to varying degrees, if rarely on the level of this child at her age. This was combined, in her instance, with a facility for vocal tone production. As I have said, I am one who includes the human voice in the category
of a musical instrument. Adrianne at four years of age, because she had not started school yet, was carrying a lovely tune with excellent intonation, up to a point.

  In preparation to evaluate the child’s musical ability, I brought a portable glockenspiel, a melodica, and a small drum. I sat on the chair near where Adrianne was seated on the floor, and played a simple melody on the glockenspiel, to see if Adrianne would or could hum or play it back. I chose for this the first four bars of Mozart’s third variation on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman.” [Oberheimer hums this music.] By the second note, Adrianne was crying. I continued to play, and she cried more loudly. When I stopped, she reached up and grabbed the glockenspiel off my lap and knocked it onto the floor. It hit the ground so hard that one of the keys broke off. I had to have it replaced, and I paid for the repair myself, so as not to involve the school district, since this was an extracurricular activity.

  As I was examining the glockenspiel, assessing the damage, Adrianne started humming again, but it was not a pretty song. The tones were erratic, on-key and off-key in a confusing jumble of notes and noises. There was no discernible pattern and no melody. The rhythms, I could only describe as arrhythmic. Arrhythmic rhythms, atonal tones—if “a-music” were a word, I would use it to describe the sound I was hearing from Adrianne. Let me be clear. It was not “a music,” as in a kind of music. It was “a-music,” as in anti-music. I could barely tolerate the sound of it.

  My assessment of Adrianne’s musical ability on that day was not as positive as I had initially expected it to be. I could identify a certain talent in the child on the basis of the musicality of the vocal tones she produced in our first moments together. However, her failure to respond to the simple melody I played for her suggested an aversion to music difficult to reconcile with her ability to create musical sounds. I left the Geffels’ house that day uncertain of what I had experienced, and yet inclined to suspect I had not encountered the Mozart of Venango County.

  When Adrianne entered school, I saw her on an ongoing basis—once every two weeks for the regular classroom music lessons, from kindergarten up to the next grade each year. For the first several years, my time in her company amounted to less than a minute in each session. She was unable to take part in music class with the other students. The sound of other children singing would so disturb her that she needed to be out of the room. Knowing this, her classroom teacher would escort her to the school library, the one place guaranteed to be quiet, while we conducted music class. Eventually, as I assume you have read, I began to work directly with Adrianne, instructing her in piano. That proved to be a fruitful experience for us both and Adrianne, in particular. The time leading up to that was one of confusion and frustration for everyone in Adrianne’s life, and also for Adrianne, I can only assume. Her teachers had their hands full—even those who weren’t teaching her music.

  Annabella Korp (elementary school teacher):

  I have only good things to say about Adry Geffel. She was wonderful! All my students were wonderful. You’ll never hear anything to the contrary from me. I believe that adults need to believe in young people. Only then will young people believe in themselves. Thank you very much for asking me. I treasure the opportunity to celebrate all my students and demonstrate to them how they can celebrate themselves.

  [Korp is asked to assess how Adrianne Geffel’s relationship with music affected her performance in the classroom.]

  None! None whatsoever. It was not an issue.

  Deirdre McAdoo (librarian):

  I was school librarian in the First Street Elementary School for four years—four school years, from fall 1966 to spring 1972, so I saw a lot of Adry Geffel. I read your notice in the paper and take it you’ve talked to her teachers. The only one I know for a fact to still be alive and living in the area is Anna-Bee Korp. She had Adry Geffel for third grade, and then again for fifth grade, after Anna-Bee left the school system and came back—another teacher had been brought in for the third grade, Lou Dragotta, but the fifth grade was open. If you’ve talked to Anna-Bee, you’ve heard what a handful Adry Geffel was. She had to take a year off after that third-grade year, just to straighten her head out again.

  Adry was with me in the library three or four times a day, sometimes more. Whenever there was any kind of music in the classroom or if one of the kids just started to sing the Flintstones theme, Adry would be sent to me. I’m quite sure a few teachers sometimes sent her just to keep the peace in the classroom. Nobody ever really knew when she would hum or sing or hear something she didn’t like and break down. Anna-Bee could tell you more about that than I can. She could never really deal with Adry.

  Marilyn Schanbaker (cousin):

  This was in the newspaper. I’m sure you know the gist of it, though the articles that I saw didn’t have everything right. I’ll give you the whole story.

  Carolyn and I are cousins, as everybody knows. Her mother, my aunt Theresa, and my mother—Carolyn’s aunt Helene—were sisters. My mother is still with us, and still keeping her own home—with no help from anybody, except Carolyn and me, when we can get there. Carolyn’s own mother passed some years ago, at one point in the midst of everything with Adry, though that had nothing to do with her passing. It may have contributed to her stress, and that’s never helpful when you have heart trouble. But I can’t see the point in blaming Adry for that.

  I came first, a little less than two years before Carolyn, so I’m the older one. People tell me I don’t look it—God bless ’em—but I think Carolyn has held up very nicely, for all she’s had to deal with. We were named to be like coordinated cousins, Marilyn and Carolyn. When we were teenagers, we even tried to match up the names of our boyfriends, but she got married, even though she’s the younger one, and I couldn’t find anybody I liked with a name that rhymed with Greg. There was a fun guy in Wilford who I met, and his nickname was Smeg, but I didn’t see a big future in that one.

  It was 1968. Adrianne was nine years old and home from school for summer vacation. Carolyn and Greg had their heart set on attending the big fuel convention, which was coming to Harrisburg, and they asked me to watch Adry overnight, so they could go away and they could have a kind of second honeymoon together. I was happy to do it. I was single, as I am to this day, but I never had a problem with kids. The plan was set for Donny to have a sleepover with one of his friends, whoever that was, and I would take Adry for the night.

  Well . . . the first day went swimmingly. We spent a lovely day together in my house. We tidied up the kitchen and dusted the furniture together. I showed her how to freshen up the cushions on the sofa by pounding on them like dough. We had a fine old time! I knew how she liked to hum little songs, from Carolyn and everybody else. From time to time during the day, she would hum a little something. It didn’t bother me.

  I wanted to make something special for dinner, so I made us Rice A Roni, Spanish-style. We were dining pleasantly, together at the kitchen table, and Adry began to hum just about the prettiest song I ever heard. I told her, “That’s beautiful, dear.” And she said, “I think so, too!”

  I said, “What is that song, Adry?”

  She said, “I don’t know—I never heard it before.”

  I said, “Oh! Really? You never sang it before?”

  And she said, “I never heard it before now.”

  I said, “What exactly do you mean, dear?”

  She said, “I don’t mean anything. I’m just listening to the song, and humming along.”

  We stopped talking for a minute and just sat and ate, and enjoyed our dinner. I was thinking about what she was saying, and I said, “Adry, sweetheart, are you hearing that music right now?”

  She said, “Yes.” She looked down and poked at the colored pepper pieces in her rice, and she said, “But it’s starting to change now.”

  That got me thinking, but I never let on to Adrianne that anything was on my mind. We cleared the table and did the dishes. We wiped down the table and mopped the floor, and by then, we were tire
d from all the day’s activities, and I tucked her in. I stayed up a little longer, and made a phone call to my friend Bonnie after Adry was asleep. I knew her husband had a brother in the car business, and I knew he had an older aunt who was a spiritual advisor. I told her, “Bonnie, I need to get the lowdown from you. Is that aunt of your brother-in-law’s the real deal? I have a situation here that’s out of the ordinary, and I need to get an expert opinion on this. I don’t want to be wasting my time with some phony gypsy fortune-teller. I need the real thing.”

  I said, “Bonnie, you know my cousin Carolyn? I’m watching her daughter, and this is going to sound pretty creepy, because that’s exactly what it is, but the girl is possessed.”

  Baucisz Mihaly:

  I didn’t know Adrianne Geffel at all. Never met her. Never bought a one of her records. My only direct connection to her is not really very direct—the one time Marilyn Schanbaker called me in the middle of the night to ask me about my brother-in-law’s aunt Camille. Marilyn wanted to know if she was a legitimate spiritual advisor. That’s how Camille advertised herself. I told her I didn’t know what to say, because we didn’t really know her very well. We kept our distance from Aunt Camille. She was Chipper’s aunt by marriage to an uncle we hardly knew, and the uncle was dead, anyway.

  [Note: By “Chipper,” Mihaly refers to her husband, Stefan Mihaly.]

  I told Marilyn, “I’m not sure what to say to you. She’s a spiritual advisor, whatever that is. What—she advises spirits? To me, it’s beyond comprehension.” That was all Marilyn needed to hear. That was endorsement enough for her. She brought Adrianne Geffel out to see her. The rest was in the newspapers.

  Marilyn Schanbaker:

  On the morning of the second day I had with Adrianne, I did what I had to do. I made us a nice breakfast of Grape-Nuts fancied up with sliced banana, and I drove Adry out to the county line. It was kind of desolate in those days. Now, it’s all built up. There’s an Applebee’s and a self-storage place and some other modern businesses out there today. But in 1968, there was hardly anything there. We pulled in from the road and drove around to the back, where the parking was.