Mountain Solo

by Jeanette Ingold

I played while listening to our paired violins and watching his face. Occasionally I'd see his eyebrows twitch, and then I'd hear why and make an adjustment. And then the twitching would stop and his eyes would twinkle. Once the twitching got so furious before I could figure out the reason for it that I burst out laughing and lost my place altogether.

  When the doorbell announced his next student, I think Mr. Geisler hated ending my lesson as much as I did.

  "Thank you," I told him. "Thank you very much."

  Mom, whom I'd pretty much forgotten, asked somewhat stiffly, "Have you an assignment for Tessie?"

  "I suppose I should," Mr. Geisler said, and I really do think his eyes twinkled at Mom. "Maybe ... Here."

  He took my right hand, which still held my violin bow, and nudged my fingers into a different position. Gently molding the way my hand was arched, he said, "Now that you're playing a full-size instrument, you might give this grip a try. Work on it, and then next time we can decide if it's an improvement."

  The new bow grip led to days of bad playing It felt awkward to me, and the sounds that came from my violin were so disappointing that I was sure I was doing something wrong Mom could hear I'd regressed, too, and she moved about our apartment with her lips pressed together.

  And then, at the end of a morning I'd spent frustrated and half-panicked at hearing myself play worse and worse, the mail brought a card from Mr. Geisler It showed a cartoonish robin fighting to pull an impossibly long worm from the ground. The caption underneath said, "Sometimes the hardest struggle comes just before success."

  I couldn't believe it. Mr. Geisler knew what a hard time I was having? He knew how I felt?

  I went back to my practicing determined to keep trying, and, sure enough, late that afternoon I was rewarded with a tone so light and sweet, so crystal-edged, that I knew I was doing what Mr. Geisler wanted me to. And I knew why.

  My lessons with Mr. Geisler that winter sparkled like bright patches amid days that otherwise felt as drab as New York clothes.

  Mr. Geisler taught me the way my very first teacher Mr. Dreyden, had, insisting that I understand that to play meant I should have fun as well as make music. "Don't take yourself so seriously," he told me. "Music's to be enjoyed!"

  He made me laugh at myself. "What?!" he'd demand, when I'd lose control of a rapid piece. "Have you a bow arm or a flapping turkey wing?!"

  But we worked hard, too, and we had a goal in sight: my audition for acceptance into one of the world's most renowned music schools. Kids came from all over to study there, and many famous musicians traced their training to it.

  Just getting accepted for an audition was a job in itself but Mom took care of that, filling out forms, gathering recommendations, and recording the required tape of me playing Mr. Geisler and I concentrated on making sure that when I did get an audition daté—he wouldn't let me doubt that I'd be given one—I'd be ready.

  I wouldn't only have to show that I played well. I'd also have to demonstrate that I already had command of a basic repertoire of classical pieces. And I'd have to be able to play them completely from memory, too. It was a huge amount to learn, and once I started attending a public junior high, I had fewer hours to practice.

  The junior high was more of Mr. Geisler's doing.

  When I mentioned I wasn't in school, he questioned Mom about it. She gave him a vague explanation without mentioning the limbo of my school status. As far as the state of Montana knew, I was still living in Missoula and being homeschooled. And as for New York—nobody in that system even knew I was there.

  "But what about her meeting other young people?" Mr. Geisler asked. "Tess needs more than music."

  "I just don't think this is the time," Mom countered.

  At my next lesson, Mr. Geisler brought it up again. This time he said, "You realize that if Tess isn't comfortable playing in a group, it will hurt her chances of being admitted to music school. She needs some orchestral experience."

  I didn't know whether that was what convinced Mom or if she gave in because it was the only thing that made sense once she found a job Anyway, in late February, the same week that Mom mailed my completed music school application, she enrolled me in a junior high that had a small school orchestra.

  It was a pretty pathetic ensemble, made up mainly of bored students who didn't particularly want to be in it. The weary teacher tuning stringed instruments for a line of kids who couldn't tell an A from an A-flat, looked as if he didn't much like conducting it, either.

  I concentrated on following his baton and tried not to let my playing stand out, but it did, anyway. After my first orchestra practice, some kids came up to ask how I'd gotten so good.

  "It's just that I've been playing since I was three," I said, embarrassed. "Almost three and a half."

  "Three?" one of the girls exclaimed. "Did someone make you? Because that would be child abuse or something." Then she and the others moved off, giggling.

  I told myself it didn't matter, that I didn't need friends, anyway. That hadn't changed just because I was in New York instead of Montana.

  Besides, when I answered Mom's questions about how the junior high was, she said she'd start looking for a place where music was appreciated.

  Then one April day a letter arrived from the music school inviting me to an audition the following month. After that, there wasn't time for thinking about anything except getting ready.

  Mom went with me, and she seemed as tightly wound as I felt. All the way on the bus, I gripped the handle of my violin case with a hand clammy with sweat.

  A woman just inside the school's main door took my name and consulted a clipboard. "The violin faculty is expecting you, Tess." She gave us a room number and directions for getting to it. "You'll find chairs set up in the hall where you can wait until you're called. Good luck!"

  As Mom and I made our way down the corridor I tried not to stare at the scattered parent-kid pairs huddled outside closed doors. Some of the kids looked older than me; some younger One boy who nervously tapped a flute inside an open case couldn't have been more than seven or eight.

  After Mom and I made a wrong turn, a really nice guy about my age, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying a cello, walked us to the right place. "It won't be bad," he told me. "Just play the way you practice."

  "Have you already had your audition?" I asked.

  "I'm already a student here," he answered. "Just in to do some make-up work." And he wished me good luck.

  THE NEXT HOUR went by in a confusion of impressions:

  Mom and me sitting on folding metal chairs.

  A door down the corridor opening and a girl coming out with tears running down her face.

  Other kids and parents searching for audition rooms, the parents' assessing eyes sweeping across my instrument case. The kids' more furtive glances.

  Faint sounds of solo music wafting from almost soundproof rooms.

  How my hands wouldn't stay still, and how Mom told me to stop shredding a tissue; I was making a mess.

  Then the door where we waited opened. A boy exited and a man told me to come in. Mom stood up with me, but he said, "Mrs. Thaler? Please wait here."

  Inside the audition room, my accompanist—a woman I'd had just one session with—was seated at a piano. Another woman welcomed me and said not to be nervous. "Take your time tuning and warming up," she told me.

  How many teachers were there? Did they all introduce themselves? When Mom asked me later I couldn't tell her because I didn't remember.

  I didn't remember any of the rest of my audition except that I closed my eyes and played straight through everything I'd prepared.

  Oh, and I remember that when I was done, the woman who'd welcomed me asked to hear a Pierre Rode étude.

  I looked at her blankly.

  "You don't know Rode?" she said.

  Someone said something in a low tone. And then the same man who'd ushered me into the room saw me out. "Thank you for giving us a chance to hear you," he said.

/>   He told Mom, "You'll receive notice of our decision within three or four weeks."

  EXACTLY THREE weeks later I got the music school's letter I didn't want to open it, I was so afraid it would be bad news. But I did and saw a sentence that began, "It is with pleasure..."

  "Mom!" I said. "Mom. I'm in! I'm in. I start in September."

  I took the letter to my next lesson, and Mr. Geisler was so happy for me. "Congratulations! I wouldn't have expected any other outcome from your audition, but still it's an accomplishment to be very proud of."

  "Now that I've been admitted, I'm a little scared about whether I'll be good enough," I told him.

  "You'll do fine."

  I thought of the Rode études. "But if the school expects me to know stuff I haven't had yet, you'll help me learn it?"

  "Your new teacher will."

  "My new teacher? What do you mean?"

  Mr. Geisler shot Mom a questioning glance. Then he told me, "When you start music school, a member of the violin faculty will take you on as a student."

  "But won't you still be my teacher also?"

  "That's not the way it works," he said. "I thought you understood that. Didn't you read the music school's literature?"

  No! I thought. Mom told me what was in it. She must have "forgotten" what I wouldn't want to hear.

  Feeling betrayed and furious, I told her "I can't believe you kept that from me. I don't want to go to music school if it means giving up Mr. Geisler."

  "Don't be ridiculous," Mom said. "Of course you do."

  I swung around to face Mr. Geisler "You should have told me."

  "Tess, I'd have to send you to another teacher before long, anyway. You've already learned most of what I can teach you."

  "That's not right," I argued. "I'm learning a lot from you."

  Smiling slightly, he said, "I hope so. But you need more. Including perhaps a more disciplined approach to your training than mine."

  "I like how you do things."

  "Come, Tess," he said. "Let's just play for fun today. Then next week we'll buckle down to see how much we can get done in the time we still have together."

  MR. GEISLER remained my teacher through the end of June, when I left to spend two months in Montana. The lessons became intense as he readied me for a summer of working on my own. We both knew I'd have to keep up my skills if I wanted to be at my best come fall.

  But the lessons were bittersweet, too, because of our awareness that he was preparing me to leave him. One day I tried to say how sad I felt about that, but he wouldn't let me.

  "Learning to say good-bye is part of growing up, Tess," he told me. "That's true whatever you do with your life, although maybe it's especially true for some people in some walks of life." He briefly rested his hand on my shoulder "I'm afraid it's a lesson you have to relearn occasionally, no matter how old you get."

  Frederik 1907–1908

  After being left unplayed for so long—the better part of a year had gone by since Frederik's one attempt—the violin's strings lay dully out of tune. Gingerly, afraid he'd break something, Frederik tightened them to match the tones of his new pitch pipe.

  "A birthday present for you, nephew," Uncle Joe had said, tossing it to him on his return from town the evening before.

  "But my birthday was in early February."

  "Two months ago, I remember and it was the second time you marked it alone. It'll be the last, though, if the new pasture makes this place finally pay for itself. Then I can give up trapping, except maybe to run a short line to teach you a few more tricks."

  Uncle Joe had shaken out his oiled slicker making water fly across the room. "Anyway, I hope you're still wanting to play that fiddle."

  Frederik did. Alone now, though, even with the violin tuned, he wasn't sure how to begin.

  He tried the bow on the D string and made a noise that caused the cat, Red, to lay back its ears. He'd forgotten how hard it was to pull the bow smoothly and not let it skitter toward the fingerboard. Finally, though, after loosening his grip and changing the angle, he produced a reasonably even tone.

  Over and over he played it, wanting his hand and arm to memorize the feel.

  All right, he thought. Now for the next note.

  By pressing the first finger of his left hand tightly against the violin's fingerboard, he shortened the part of the string that the bow could set vibrating It gave him a note that was higher—not exactly an E, but very close, and with some experimenting he got it sounding right.

  The next note he tried, played by pressing his second finger down, was less successful, but he could almost hear his father saying, "Frederik, give attention. The D scale has two sharps: F-sharp and C-sharp." He slid his finger higher to find the first sharp.

  His third finger produced a G.

  Come on, he thought. I can't play Maureen a song with just those notes.

  He moved his bow across the open A string and played it and then repeated the fingering pattern to get B, C-sharp, and then another higher D. An octave! Low D to high D.

  "Hey!" he exclaimed so loudly that the cat sprang to its feet. "Sorry, Red."

  Within a couple of hours, Frederik was working the notes into simple melodies. Then his uncle came in with mail he'd fetched from town.

  "Listen," Joe said, and he read aloud a typed letter filled with phrases like "unauthorized usage." He said, "Of course there's a mistake in the railroad's records. I've told them that. But I'd better write again with the particulars of my deed of sale."

  "Do you think the railroad people will believe you?" Frederik asked.

  "They'd better Meanwhile, the first chance I get I'll ride to town to see the land locator who handled this place when the Middlers sold it to me. He knows whose land this is."

  "I could go with you," Frederik offered.

  Joe laughed. "And, I suppose, take Maureen along, so you can treat her to a soda and a ride in one of those horse-pulled streetcars?" His voice turned serious again. "Nephew, sixteen is still too young to be in love, and Naill O'Leary might not like you courting his daughter Especially not behind his back."

  "I'm not courting her" Frederik protested. "There's nothing for him to mind."

  "How about when he finds out how much time you're together not courting?"

  Frederik spread out a blanket while Maureen unpacked a picnic lunch of elk sausage, biscuits, and huckleberry pie. The day was a double celebration—Maureen's sixteenth birthday and two years exactly since the September day they'd first met.

  They'd walked a long time to get to this spot by a huge old ponderosa, but it commanded a view into the autumn valley that was better for the effort of reaching it.

  Taking a bite of sausage, Frederik said, "This is good. Did you make it?"

  Maureen nodded. "And I put up the huckleberries, too. I've done all the cooking since ... for a long time."

  A distance karoom rocked the air, followed by a pair of smaller shocks. "That must be Pa and Augie working at the mine," Maureen said. "It's all Pa can think about these days, especially now the government's saying we don't even own our place on the creek."

  Frederik turned to look at her "It's not right that you have to do all the work that gets done there."

  "I don't mind," Maureen answered, and then rushed her next words. "I know what people in town say about us. About my mother because she ran off the way she did, and about my father because they think his bad temper was what made her leave. But he didn't used to be angry all the time, and I remember her teaching me nice things."

  "Like what?" Frederik asked. "Besides how to cook?"

  "Oh ... like how to make things pretty. I just finished making a candleholder—just a tin can, but I punched a pattern of holes in it the way my mother showed me. It shines so nice when a candle's lit inside!"

  She bit her lip and then seemed to come to a decision. "Pa and Augie are staying at the mine tonight, so if you'd like to go back with me to our place later on, I can show you."

  THE CANDLE
FLICKERING in the punched can did make a pretty picture for Frederik and Maureen to look at while they ate. They finished supper—more elk sausage and the end of the pie—and then a quiet fell between them as they faced each other across the table.

  It seemed strange to Frederik to be here with Maureen—this was the first time that he'd actually been inside her house. The feet of being here, though, wasn't enough to account for the hot and cold feelings running through him.

  "Maureen," he began, hardly knowing how he intended to continue. The door being thrown open interrupted him.

  Frederik recognized Maureen's brother against the backlight in the instant before Augie lunged at him, and then the two of them were fighting and Maureen was screaming at them to stop. The fight lasted only briefly, until one of Frederik's fists cracked against Augie's jaw and flung him reeling backward.

  Augie doubled over and vomited until dry heaves racked him. Then with thick, half-formed words he ordered Maureen to get her things.

  Frederik wondered if he'd broken Augie's jaw.

  Maureen, sounding fearful, said, "Augie, I don't want to go to the mine. Pa's going to be..." She got a towel, and while she cleaned her brother's face, she kept pleading "Augie, please?"

  "What you say ... between you and Pa," Augie finally told her "We'll wait till morning, but you're going And you get him out now."

  Maureen rinsed the towel in a basin and hung it to dry before turning to Frederik. Her eyes asked a question.

  She wants me to decide for her, Frederik thought, suddenly frightened in a way he hadn't been in those moments he'd fought with Augie. If I want her to, Maureen will walk out of here with me now; will do what I tell her to do.

  "Maureen," he said awkwardly, "we're not ... I'm not..."

  Her voice didn't waver when she said, "Then thank you for a lovely day. I apologize for its ending."

  Frederik moved through the evening chores hardly seeing the work he did. He wasn't ready to be responsible for someone else, and Maureen shouldn't expect him to be.