She’d be better off hidden in her seat, buttoned up in her melton coat, rather than weaving in and out of the society throngs in her preposterous ensemble. She never knows quite what to wear. Tonight, after checking her coat and catching a glimpse of herself in an ornate mirror set in gilded plaster, she feels particularly absurd. She expected her sweater (a scoop-necked cashmere in muted orange acquired at Rose’s Redux on Union Street) to look smart with the pleated chartreuse skirt that she’d found on the clearance rack at City of Paris. If you squinted, the skirt looked close to lime—a citrus ensemble, she dubbed it sweet and tart. But in the Opera House mirror, even in the warm, honey light of the lobby, squinting doesn’t help. She looks, she fears, like some sort of loathsome accident or tropical disaster.
Still, she mingles again with the crowd on the marble floor. Is she hoping she’ll find a kindred soul? A man in a pineapple suit? A skinny woman looking like an hors d’oeuvre on melba toast? She doesn’t know anyone here. The men are ordinary enough in their suits, the ladies not so lovely as they imagine. Every now and then a beatnik strolls by, one gangly fellow with a bobbing Adam’s apple and a sport coat short in the sleeves. A genuine music lover, no doubt. Next time she’ll wink at him.
Sylvia leans against a column and reminds herself why she’s here. Soon she’ll be tucked away in the Myersons’ box, anticipating—yes, anticipating—the moment that Inez Roseman walks onstage to a rumble of applause.
Tonight Sylvia plans to rent opera glasses and keep them trained on her subject. She’ll scan the violinist’s slightly parted lips, her blue eyes, hone in on the bruise under her chin. Soon enough the rest of the orchestra will disappear. The audience will vanish, too, and Sylvia Bran will enjoy a command performance.
THE only thing worse than feeling self-conscious in your anonymity is to be singled out. And it happens.
“Sylvia! Sylvia!”
She wants to believe that another Sylvia is being hailed, but she recognizes the man’s voice—it belongs to her boss.
Hyman Myerson, his treble clef string tie wittier than ever under a dark blue, pin-striped suit, with a stout middle-aged woman, presumably his wife, in tow, is coming toward her.
“Well, look who’s here,” Hy says. “I thought we might find you. Meet my wife, Toby.”
Sylvia extends her hand. “Mrs. Myerson.”
“Call me Toby. Hy’s told me all about you. Best showroom pianist he’s had in years.”
“All right, all right. Don’t swell the girl’s head.”
“What? The girl’s head is not swollen. You’re the one with the swollen head.”
Hy Myerson shrugs; he rolls his eyes.
Sylvia smiles at Toby, whose round, heavily rouged cheeks have the sheen of an apple made of wax.
“Can you believe,” Hy says, pointing his chin toward his wife, “Toby was a dancer when I first met her? What a beauty she was. Took one look at her and I got the mind lasso going.”
“Don’t start.”
“Who’s starting?”
“The trouble is, she’s too good a cook, and, on top of that, she enjoys her own cooking.”
“Stop.”
Mrs. Myerson turns aside. The poor woman is dressed beautifully in a woven tapestry suit the colors of honey and moss. Sylvia watches Toby open her beaded bag and pluck out a tube of lipstick.
“Sylvia’s the only one from the store to use the symphony tickets,” Hy says to his wife. “What does that tell you? Bunch of heathens we work with.” He smiles at his pianist. “Toby and I like to make an appearance once in a while, but you really go in for the stuff.”
“I enjoy the concerts, but I’m rather ignorant about classical music.”
Hy nods to her encouragingly. She can tell that he wants her to keep talking.
“I was a music major in college,” says Sylvia, “but all those theory classes—in one ear and out the other. Same thing with the musical forms. I remembered the stuff long enough to pass the tests, then—gone. It’s pretty embarrassing. I practiced the piano for hours, but I might as well have been sitting at the typewriter for all I learned about music. There wasn’t much music in my house growing up. My mother was more fond of language.” Sylvia laughs. “If anyone asked my mother if she played an instrument, she’d nod and say, ‘The lingua franca.’ ”
Toby Myerson presses her lips together after applying a fresh stripe of rose across them. “Your mother sounds very interesting.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” Sylvia smiles at Hy’s wife. “But me, I’m left with my ignorance.”
“Talk about ignorant.” Toby nods toward her husband.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hy says.
“The man makes his living from music and he can’t tell the difference between Mozart and Brahms.”
“Not exactly my forte.”
“What exactly is your forte?” says his wife, nastily.
“Toby, Toby, forgive me for being alive.” Hy goes through a sequence of tics—he squishes his nostrils together, lifts one eyebrow and then the other, smacks his lips three times, then rolls his shoulders as if he expects wings to sprout. He tugs on his string tie. Finally, he pulls a pack of Salems out of his jacket pocket, offers one to Sylvia, who declines, and then to his wife, who grudgingly accepts a cigarette and allows him to light it with his Zippo.
Sylvia’s seen Hy run through these tics in the showroom when he becomes frustrated with a customer. Sometimes the tics follow an aborted sale, but there have been instances when they’ve mesmerized the customer and had the effect of clearing the slate so that Hy can swoop down again with his inimitable charm and make the deal. But what kind of fool hopes to work a flurry of tics and a tug on a string tie to advantage with his wife?
Sylvia is not above trying to help out. “I can’t stop admiring your suit, Mrs. Myerson.”
“Toby.”
“I bought it for her in Italy,” Hy says. “Sorrento, if I remember correctly. We were on a little cruise along the Amalfi coast. Her suit cost fifty thousand lira or some damn thing. A small fortune. Crazy money they have over there. You feel like you’re spending your life savings on a pair of shoes. It’s very becoming on her, don’t you think?”
“Beautiful,” Sylvia says. Then she excuses herself to rent a pair of opera glasses.
“We’ll see you up in the box,” Hy calls after her.
INEZ hadn’t expected to get the virtuoso’s dressing room. The minor soloists and second-rank divas usually get the smaller ones, but tonight they’ve set up the star’s dressing room for her. Of course, there’s no other soloist on the program tonight, but she decides not to second-guess her temporary fortune.
Inez has been in this room before. In the midforties, as a young woman playing in both the symphony and opera orchestra, she’d tiptoed in to see the vases of orchids set out for Lily Pons, who sang the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor. Innumerable times after concerts, she’d crossed the threshold to greet the aging virtuosos she’d idolized as a girl: Fritz Kreisler, her father-in-law’s god, who struck Inez as remarkably formal given how relaxed he seemed onstage; the mechanical Heifetz, who looked right through her as if she were a glass of water; the sweet-toned Nathan Milstein, who kissed her hand and offered her a handkerchief when he noticed tears welling in her eyes; Efrem Zimbalist, who first played with the symphony in 1911 and whose son is now, of all things, a television star on one of Jake’s favorite shows—77 Sunset Strip. Inez even stepped into this room to meet the least distinguished violin soloist of all—Jack Benny, who pretended that they were long-lost friends and had the roomful of visitors in stitches as he made up a story about being Inez’s first violin teacher. “I didn’t know whhhat to do with that child’s bow hand. It was the most awkward thing I ever saw in my life. Really.”
Now, for a single night, the room is hers. A magnificent bouquet of South American roses sits in the center of the dressing table. Thick, long-stemmed beauties with enormous globes. She expects they’re a gi
ft from the symphony association and is surprised to see a card signed with Jake’s name. There is an open box of French chocolates from Simon Brothers and a plate of sliced melon with prosciutto draped across it. Inez thinks to take a chocolate but decides not to touch the box or the plate of melon so that when the kids come backstage after the performance they can see the perfection of the soloist-for-the-night’s life. The other reason for not eating the chocolate, Inez decides, after crouching to take a whiff, is that she’d probably end up with a glob of it between her teeth. That would be rich—the soloist with the chocolate smile. Inez imagines the plates of chocolates that were likely left in Mozart’s dressing rooms in Vienna and Salzburg when he was little more than a child. Did he pause for fear of leaving traces of chocolate on his mouth? Hardly. The man-child probably gobbled up the whole plate of sweets. Why was it so hard to let herself have pleasure? All those hours of practice? She thinks about Sylvia the reporter. Again, the reporter’s warm hand on her cheek, leaving her with a lovely benediction. Maybe the girl is part healer; more likely Inez is mad to think it.
Inez plucks from the plate a dark round gem, crowned with a violet fleur-de-lis. What in the world is inside? She dents the hard wall with her front teeth and, though she won’t swallow it, she closes her eyes around the taste of dark chocolate and hazelnut. The chocolate is a wonderfully dark avenue, and then the sweet paste. Her father’s favorite. Would he have been proud of her or secretly shamed that this is all she’s made of her career? So much talent and no more than a single night in front of a symphony orchestra. She has no excuse. She has a hundred excuses. But only a single truth: she doesn’t want to live anymore. She could explain all night long, but never satisfy the interrogators. Why is she doing this tonight? Who does she think she’s playing for? What glory here? She finds a tissue and spits out her chocolate.
I N the dim light of the loge, Sylvia flips through her program. Instead of reading up on Karl Goldmark, she searches for a photograph of Inez. As the first set of curtain bells rings, she finds the miniature photo. The violinist’s likeness reduced to the size of a thumbnail. Sylvia is outraged. Tonight, Inez Roseman should be rewarded with a large, beautiful photograph.
“Here we are,” Hy Myerson says as he ushers his wife to her seat in the box.
Once he sits down, Hy asks Sylvia if he can borrow her opera glasses. “I think I see Jake Roseman over there in the first box. You know, the soloist’s husband. I admire the man’s work.”
Sylvia decides to play dumb. “What does he do?”
“You don’t know Roseman? Yep, there he is. Looks like he’s got his kids with him. And his father. His father used to play in the symphony. He was the concertmaster, back in the days when it was a second-rate symphony. He’s just another old goat now. But Jake, he’s a big attorney in town, been leading protests on behalf of the Negro for quite some time. Quite the media ham. But the man does some very impressive work.”
“Impressive,” Mrs. Myerson mimics.
“What’s the matter with you, Toby?”
Sylvia, hoping to steer clear of the marital nastiness, peers over toward the first box. She can’t wait to get her glasses on the family.
Toby, on the far side of Hy, sits up tall to get Sylvia’s attention. “Have you ever noticed the way men go in for heroes? It doesn’t matter what their business is. They don’t discriminate. Baseball players. Gangsters. Business tycoons. Union leaders. Politicians. Movie stars. Evangelists. Boxers.”
“What are you talking about, Toby?”
“Leave it to Hyman. Now he goes in for a man who champions Negroes. When have you ever cared about Negroes? When’s the last time you sold a piano to a Negro? You ever seen him sell a piano to a Negro, Sylvia?”
“A man’s got the money, I’ll sell him anything.”
“But will you give a Negro credit?”
“What credit? I can’t give away the store.”
“See. You’ll give a white man credit.”
Hy shrugs, then leans toward Sylvia. “You want to know the secret to married life?” Hy points to his right ear. “In one ear and out the other.”
The musicians begin to amble onstage. Sylvia loves that some of them meander to their seats without any sense of urgency. Tonight, Inez doesn’t come on with the others. A happy-go-lucky young man, cracking a joke with his stand mate, sits in Inez’s chair. Clearly, they’ve granted the soloist leave from the opening piece, a Haydn symphony. A smatter of applause greets the concertmaster as he walks onstage. Then the suave conductor, João Bonfa, appears. The man’s definitely a crowdpleaser—during rhapsodic passages, he employs the sweeping flourishes of a matador, and the critics have begun to suggest that he’s a charlatan. Sylvia, though, doesn’t mind a little theater, a bit of illusion.
Now the strings respond to the downbeat with a single, lush chord, a broad shelf on which a young woman could rest her chin and look at the world. Sylvia has no intention of responding to the courtly elegance of Haydn’s Symphony no. 92. She’s saving herself for Inez Roseman and the Goldmark. With her opera glasses, Sylvia scans the audience in the boxes and on the main floor. It’s astonishing how many of the patrons look like aged gargoyles in their seats. A thirty-year-old woman begins to feel young.
Sylvia turns her glasses on Jake Roseman. He’s a better-looking man than he appears in the newspapers—downright handsome, in fact, in his dark suit and crisp white shirt. Is he as anxious as Sylvia for his wife’s appearance? It hardly appears so. The children seem blissfully indifferent. The cherubic boy is playing counting games on his fingers, and the pubescent daughter, who doesn’t look to have either her mother’s beauty or her intensity, appears to be reading from a barely concealed book in her lap. The grandfather, decked out in a faded tuxedo, sits dour-faced with his fists clenched. Sylvia puts down her glasses and listens to the measured swell of the string section.
TONIGHT, before he went out to conduct the Haydn, Maestro Bonfa dipped his head into Inez’s dressing room and gave her a beguiling smile. Had there been something to it? A ladies’ man, Bonfa has always maintained a formal demeanor around her. Courtly. Inez had been momentarily giddy last fall after Bonfa agreed to let her play the Goldmark this season. It set her mind off in a strange direction—a brief fantasy where she tried to imagine what it would be like to undress for Maestro Bonfa. To fall into his arms. None of it amounted to more than a curious game a middle-aged woman plays when she tries to remind herself that she’s a woman.
She guessed that Bonfa was no more accomplished as a lover than as a conductor. The man had essentially lost control of the symphony. He spent most of the rehearsal time on the common repertory, barely leaving time to run through pieces that the orchestra was less familiar with. He made small, passionate speeches in hopes of compensating for what he couldn’t accomplish with his baton. The last time they rehearsed the Eroica, Bonfa gave a history lesson, noting that Beethoven had originally dedicated the symphony to Napoléon, the liberator of the common man. “But once Napoléon became emperor,” Bonfa said, shaking his head mournfully, “Beethoven tore up his dedication and retitled it the ‘Sinfonia eroica.’ So this music . . . this music should be played with a sense of worldly grief, you understand? Not personal grief, but worldly grief.”
“I’d be all set,” her stand partner, Paul Scaffidi, whispered to Inez, “if I could only find the worldly grief button on my fiddle.”
Now, standing with her violin in the wings, Inez watches João Bonfa come offstage after the Haydn. He smiles warmly to her. A few beads of sweat are shining on his forehead. He adjusts his cummerbund, pats his forehead with a handkerchief.
“Are you all right, dear?” he asks and pushes back his thick black hair.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ll play it wonderfully. Just like in rehearsal.” Bonfa comes over to her and surprises her with a kiss, not on the cheek, but on an open length of her neck. She notices the baton in his left hand, just as his right hand sweeps briskly down her l
eft side and rests on her waist. Her mouth opens.
Inez focuses on the task ahead of her. She’s known the Goldmark since she studied it as a girl. Karl Goldmark, a Jewish violin prodigy with twenty brothers and sisters, who escaped the poverty of his Hungarian village to study at the Vienna Conservatory. She takes a deep breath and senses a live current running down the center of her. She has no choice now but to go on.
WHEN Inez Roseman appears onstage, poised as a sliver of moon, in the same aubergine linen sleeveless dress that she’d worn in her living room, Sylvia lets out an involuntary gasp, an audible response to emotions that she doesn’t understand.
Hy Myerson pats her arm. “You doing okay over there? He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he?”
João Bonfa is in the midst of a gallant bow to Inez. “Yes,” she says. “He’s really something.”
“Between you and me, I don’t think he’s the marrying kind,” Hy says. “Now, let’s see what Inez Roseman can do with the Allegro Moderato.”
“Hush,” Toby whispers. “Quit showing off that you’ve read the program.”
“What are you talking about? I know the entire repertoire like it’s my mother.”
“Show me a gonif.”
“This is a romantic classic. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a little romance.” Hy winks at his wife, who, despite inhaling dismissively, cannot fully resist her husband’s charm.
Sylvia tries to relax as the orchestra lays down a dour, if stately, theme. A minor march that doesn’t seem the slightest bit romantic. Inez stands still as a soldier. Is she counting measures until she comes in? Does she even have to count? Of course not. But Sylvia finds herself counting. At twenty bars, Inez lifts her violin—much sooner than Sylvia expects—and, in a few measures, she enters, her tone as clear as a human voice. Clearer.
Hy inhales like a man intoxicated in a rose garden. “Glorious,” he whispers. Toby takes her husband’s hand.
Beautiful Inez Page 8