Annie lived in Halifax. She played in the string section of Symphony Nova Scotia.
Morley said, “I’d love to have lunch.”
They met in a large formal dining room, on the top floor of a downtown department store.
Music had always been a big part of Dave’s and his sister’s lives. It was no accident that Annie played in the symphony and that Dave owned a record store and had spent all those years working in rock and roll.
Dave and Annie’s father, Charlie, loved music. There was no money for music lessons when Charlie was a kid, but as an adult, he taught himself to play the piano and, during the dark Cape Breton winter nights, the double bass. When Dave and Annie were growing up, they were constantly surrounded by music. Nearly every morning, when it was time to get the kids out of bed, Charlie would sing them awake. He would make up lyrics about the day ahead, the things they were going to do. He used tunes that drove them crazy, like “Hello, Dolly”:
Hello, math test
This is Dave, math test
It’s so nice to have a test
On Tuesday morn—
“Come on, Davey.
Up and at ’em!”
Or “Big Spender”:
The minute you walked in the room
I could tell you were a real cool fraction
Math-a-maction!
Numerator hangs out over the line
How’d you like to come and be reduced sometime?
What Charlie loved most were the nights when friends came over to the house and made music with him. He used to send away to a store in New York City for sheet music. He would hand out the music a week before his get-togethers so people could practice. Anyone was welcome as long as he or she could play something, which made for weird combinations of instruments: for example, a trio made up of recorder, double bass, and trumpet. Charlie was inevitably the worst player in these bands because, although he loved music, he had absolutely no sense of rhythm and a very unusual sense of pitch. So the guy on the recorder and the guy on the trumpet would be playing away, and Charlie would lumber along on his bass about twenty yards behind them. Charlie was often still playing when the others got to the end of the piece. When Charlie finally played his last note, his friend Fred, who regularly showed up to play the piano, would say, “Well, we won that one, Charlie.” They had a great time.
* * *
Both Dave and Annie began piano lessons the autumn they began school. They studied with the only piano teacher in Big Narrows, Sister Emilienne, at the convent of the Sisters of St. Seriah.
Sister Emilienne came from Pointe-Verte on the south shore of the Baie des Chaleur. She was French, but she could speak English, and Annie thought she was the nicest, kindest woman in the world.
Sister Emilienne’s studio, with the wainscoting and the two pianos, was the closest to religion that Annie and Dave ever got. The room was so ordered and quiet that it lent a sense of mystery and sanctity to music.
Sister Emilienne had names for all the notes on the piano. Mrs. Treble Clef with her tightly folded skirt; Mr. Bass Clef with two buttons on his shirt. When Dave was having trouble with B-flat, Sister Emilienne drew little bumblebees wherever Dave was supposed to play the note. “Press hard,” she said. “Make the bee flat.” In one lesson, the B became Dave’s best note. He became very attached to the B.
Sister Emilienne would sit on the piano bench as they played, and as she listened, her head would tilt to the right. She would smile and nod and tilt over, just like the nuns in The Sound of Music.
Annie adored her. One spring she went on a school trip to Quebec City and brought Sister Emilienne a little plastic snowglobe from Ste. Anne de Beaupré. It was the size of a baseball, with a miniature model of the shrine inside.
“Oh, look,” said Sister Emilienne when she opened her present. “When I shake it, look how the angels fly around the shrine.” She put it on a shelf in her studio.
Every lesson Annie would head off determined to find out if Sister Emilienne had any hair under her wimple, or if, as Dave had earnestly told her, she was as bald as a bowling ball. Annie was forever touching Sister Emilienne’s long graceful robes. There seemed to be so many mysterious layers. Sometimes Annie would reach out and touch one of the crosses that hung around the nun’s neck.
Sometimes when she came home from her lessons, Annie would dress up in her mother’s skirts and put on some of her old jewelry. Margaret would sit patiently at the piano, and Annie would give her mother a piano lesson. “Put your thumb on the C,” she would say, and Margaret would put her thumb on the D beside middle C and say, “This one?”
Piano seemed to come naturally to Annie. She was playing Bach in the first year. And maybe Sister Emilienne was right. Maybe she could play better than any six-year-old in the country.
Indeed, the summer after she began her lessons, Annie was chosen to play for Queen Elizabeth when she came to Halifax.
The recital was on the lawn of the citadel. They set up a stage and a yellow and white awning for shade. Annie was sitting two rows behind the queen, and she saw her yawn while the choir was singing “Farewell to Nova Scotia.” To this day Annie can remember watching the queen yawn and deciding that playing Bach was not a good idea. Thinking that the queen had probably already heard Bach, Annie decided it would be better if she made something up. When they called her name, she walked onto the stage in her new smocked dress, her white socks, and her black shoes. She sat at the piano, and when she began to play, she was making the notes up out of her head. If someone hadn’t come and dragged her off the stage, she would have sat there forever, entertaining the queen, completely confident that her improvisation was far superior to Bach.
One day when Annie was seven, Charlie invited a fiddler to the house to play with him, and when Annie saw his violin, she fell in love with it. She had never been so close to a violin before. She loved the way it looked, and the smell of the rosin and the rich colors of the wood, and she adored the sound. When they finished playing, she asked her father if she could touch the violin.
The day Annie began her violin lessons was the most exciting day of her life. She came home from her first class and ripped open her violin case. She made the whole family listen to what she could do. She could play all four open strings: E, A, D, and G. She had her mother call out the notes, and she would play them. She couldn’t believe how easy it was.
The next week her teacher taught her to put down her first finger, and she could play A and B on one string. That was a very big deal.
She wanted to learn how to read notes.
“Just show me where they are,” she said. Pretty soon she was able to play small pieces with the teacher playing along. She was a violinist. It was brilliant.
It made Charlie extraordinarily happy to watch his daughter. But Annie didn’t notice. Because the music made her happier.
Eventually, she got to a whole different level, and playing the violin became work. She did what lots of kids do: She pretended to practice. She would shut the door to her room and set up a novel on her music stand. She would play random notes and read the book as she played—she raced through Anne of Green Gables this way—and when her mother called from the kitchen, “That doesn’t sound like practicing to me,” Annie would call back to say she was sight-reading.
But she kept at it. And if you keep at anything long enough, the work adds up. She went to McGill University and studied music. When she graduated, she got a job with the Montreal String Quartet. It was a wonderful honor for a young musician—playing with three great musicians, all of them at least a decade older—but she felt incomplete. She wasn’t having fun. Everyone was so intense. And earnest. Annie had thought that when she got out of school, playing music would be fun again.
One day a friend who knew the famous Israeli violinist Avi Stovman said, “He takes students, you know. If you want to write to him, you can mention my name.” So Annie wrote. And to her great shock, Avi Stovman called her back. She came home from
a rehearsal one afternoon, and her roommate said, “You are not going to believe who called today.”
When Annie called him back, he said, “Send me a tape.” So she made a tape and sent it to him. But he didn’t respond. She waited for a month and never heard a word. She thought, The tape was horrible. She decided he was laughing so hard, he couldn’t make it to the telephone. Her friends said, “Phone him back.” And one night after a big spaghetti dinner, when they had drunk two bottles of Mateus, her boyfriend, Owen, dragged her to the telephone and dialed Avi Stovman’s number. He handed her the phone and held her to the wall to make her talk to the great violinist.
When Stovman answered, he said, “I’ve been going to the post office every day. Where is your tape?”
It had been lost in the mail.
He said, “There is nothing I can do. I only take seven students. My class is already full.”
Annie decided he had listened to the tape and it was dreadful and he was just being polite. But her friends didn’t let her quit. They said, “Go to New York and phone him when you get there. Play for him.”
In April, Owen forced her into a car, and they set off for New York City. They drove until after midnight, following Highway 9 along the valley of the Hudson River. The next morning when they stopped for breakfast in Hastings-on-Hudson, Pete Seeger walked by them on their way to the cafe. Owen said, “It’s an omen.” They were in Manhattan just after noon. The idea was Annie would make a casual phone call and then go and play for Avi Stovman.
She called him from outside a bookstore on the corner of Fifty-second and Seventh.
He said, “Where are you? You sound like you’re around the corner.”
Annie said, “I am around the corner.” She was standing on one foot and then the other, not looking at Owen, who was watching from inside the bookstore.
Stovman said, “Come on over. I’m leaving tomorrow morning at eight o’clock. But you can come tonight and play for me.”
“That’s okay,” Annie replied. “I don’t think it’s a very good time.” Then she said goodbye and hung up. Her music career was over. She didn’t have what it took. She broke up with Owen on the way home at a gas station in Pough-keepsie.
Three months later, Annie told the whole story to the viola player in the Montreal String Quartet. It turned out that this woman knew Stovman’s assistant. They had studied together.
“You’re crazy,” the woman said. “I’m going to phone Ruth. You are going to play for Stovman when he comes to Montreal.”
Stovman remembered the girl who hadn’t sent the tape and hadn’t come to play. He was interested enough to see if she would show up on her third chance. He said, “All right. When I’m in Montreal, if she wants, she can come and she can play and I will listen.”
Annie went to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and knocked on his door nervously. He was playing with the Montreal Symphony that night. It was four in the afternoon, and he was sitting in his room watching MAS*H on television.
Annie warmed up in the bathroom. She thought she sounded okay. But when she came out to play for him, a strange thing happened. She put her bow on the strings, and she couldn’t hear anything.
She stopped, and Stovman looked at her and said, “What’s wrong? Keep playing.” So she started again, but she still couldn’t hear the music. When she finished, she didn’t have a clue what she had done. It could have been the same random notes she played for the queen.
Stovman said, “Is that a favorite piece?”
Annie just stared at him, horrified at what had happened. In the middle of this long silence, Annie realized Stovman was looking for a nice way to get rid of her. She said, “Maybe it’s not a good idea that I come to New York.” She was trying to help him out.
“What?” he snapped. “Do you think you won’t learn anything? You think you have nothing to learn? Of course you have to come to New York. I’m just trying to think how we’re going to get you started.”
And that was that.
To help pay for the lessons in New York, Annie got a job playing at Radio City Music Hall. She did the Liza Minnelli show. She had to wear a sequined gown even though the orchestra was in the pit, because at every show, there was a moment when the pit was raised. The orchestra would play a number as they hovered in the air, and then they would drop out of sight again.
Some of the people had been in the pit for over a decade. They hated what they were doing, but they didn’t leave, because it was a good job and steady. One night Annie watched the trombone player filling out his income-tax form during the show—putting down his pen and picking up his trombone without missing a cue.
Stovman had an apartment on Riverside Drive, in the same building as Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman. Perlman lived on the top floor in the apartment where Babe Ruth used to live.
Once, while Annie was warming up, she played a reel, and Stovman screamed at her. “Don’t play like that in here,” he said. The accompanist told Annie that Stovman was harder on her than any of his other pupils. That made her happy. She stayed two years.
When she left, she was offered a job with the Boston Symphony. She got married six months later. She thought she had everything she ever wanted.
But life with the orchestra didn’t suit Annie. She found the program repetitive, and when the conductor did choose new pieces to perform, they were seldom things Annie wanted to play. After rehearsals and performances, the younger members would sometimes gather at one another’s apartments for a glass of wine, but invariably, the talk would return to the same tired complaints—the lousy salaries, the long hours, the lack of opportunity. Annie had the job she’d always wanted, but she couldn’t find any joy in it.
Then the first violinist left the orchestra, and the undercurrent of rivalry that Annie had always suspected was there burst into the open. The woman in the chair beside Annie suddenly stopped talking to her, and it didn’t take long for Annie to learn that the woman had tried to undercut her—had actually complained to the conductor that she was tired of carrying Annie, that Annie always played off tempo.
When her marriage began to fall apart, Annie decided she’d had enough. She quit the orchestra and moved back to Nova Scotia with her daughter, Margot.
Stovman was furious. He wrote her a blistering three-page letter. “What are you trying to do to me?” he wrote. To him? thought Annie. What am I doing to him? Oddly, the letter made her feel better about her decision. She took a contract with Symphony Nova Scotia. She also joined a Celtic group. Suddenly, music was fun again.
Morley knew much of this, but she hadn’t heard all of it before, not all at once. They were eating dessert when she told Annie about Sam’s piano lessons and what his teacher, Mrs. Crouch, had said about him. She explained her plan to send Sam to music camp so he could study with Laurence Merriman.
Annie said, “Laurence Merriman is a prissy snob. I thought Sam already had a music teacher. You said he was having fun with the guy.”
On Thursday, when Morley took Sam to his piano lesson she asked if she could stay and watch. Ray Spinella, the one-armed teacher, looked surprised but delighted. “You could sit over there,” he said.
Morley did her best to disappear. She needn’t have bothered. Ray and Sam were soon utterly absorbed by the music. Morley noticed that Ray obviously wasn’t following a method. And he wasn’t teaching the grade-one syllabus.
At the end of the lesson, Ray had Sam make up a tune. Then Ray took a trumpet off the top of the piano, stood beside her son, and played along. Sam smiled at his teacher, Ray nodded, and they both kept going.
On the way home, Morley said, “When you’re at camp, do you think they’ll give you your own horse, or do you have to share it?”
Sam said, “I think you have to share. But I’m going to save up and buy my own horse. I’m going to call him Bach. Ray is going to teach me some of the cowboy songs that Bach wrote. Can I do piano next year?”
“We’ll see,” said Morley.
Sam ha
d his face pressed to the car window. He was whistling the tune that he had just made up. The tune he and Ray had been playing together.
Morley smiled.
Spring
“Be-Bop-A-Lula”
It was study break. And, as if on cue, spring was in the air. “Maybe a record high for this time of year,” said the weatherman. Dave wore his spring jacket and sneakers to work. Walking out the front door, he felt … light. The sun warm on his face for the first time in months.
Morley had taken the kids to Florida.
“It’s great,” she said on the phone. “I wish you could have come. God, I needed this.”
Dave was home alone.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”
But he wasn’t okay. Something strange was going on. It began after he drove his family to the airport. It began as a funny whirling feeling in his stomach. It wasn’t like he was sick. It was a pleasant sort of feeling. Like being excited. Or nervous. But Dave wasn’t feeling excited or nervous about anything. He was feeling … goofy.
At first he thought he was tired. He had stayed up late helping his wife pack. At midnight he had taken the car to the all-night gas station. His family was leaving at seven in the morning. They were at the airport at five-thirty. I must be tired, he thought.
He went to bed early on Wednesday and slept soundly, but when he woke up in the morning, the feeling was still there. Except more so.
He felt … giddy.
It was another beautiful day.
“You wouldn’t believe the weather,” he said to Morley on the phone. “Everyone is outside. It’s like someone pulled a switch.”
On his way home, he bought a bottle of red wine and picked up a video. This is great, he thought. I never get to do this. He cooked pasta and mixed it with garlic and broccoli and drank half the bottle of wine. While he ate, he listened to Paganini’s Violin Concerto, Number One, occasionally directing the CD with his fork. After he finished, he put on coffee and did the dishes. He was looking forward to watching his movie, but as he was putting away the Paganini, he spotted an old Beatles album, and the whirling in his stomach intensified. It was the sound track from A Hard Day’s Night. He hadn’t listened to the record in years. The summer he was sixteen, he had gone to England with his parents and had brought the album back with him. It was possible that he had been the first person in the country to own it. He pulled the record out of its jacket and spun it between his palms.
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