I threw myself onto her Pittsfield bed.
“Mom, please. What are you talking about? You didn’t treat us the same!”
“We most certainly did.”
“Oh, please! Father used to beat Jinx up! How do you call that treating us the same?”
Silence. Her next words fired back with a pistol whip, the sequel to walking away from a restaurant table, splattering me onto the carpeted gravel of the freshly paved blacktop of 23rd Street.
“I really can’t talk about this now.”
The truth was just the truth, nothing more. It lay there like a weightless speck of dust to be brushed off the lapel of a coat. And the brilliant clarity of this truth cast its ugly beam of light through a Hoover-like telephone cord, terminating in my hand with a snap.
That click. That monstrously soft sound echoed as I wondered how I was going to negotiate my life from now on. Surely she would call back. Perched on my perfectly made bed, I waited for two hours, until 7:15 p.m., the latest possible time I could leave my apartment and still make the 8:00 p.m. downbeat of the show scheduled for that evening. I played Beauty and the Beast in a stupor. I was made to wait one full year for her to call back.
It proved to be a busy 364 days.
I received a letter from my father, stating that my mother was the most loving and sensitive woman on the planet. I slept. I won an award from the League of Composers/ISCM and was given a grant to fund an oboe recital, for which I commissioned two new works and performed them at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. I was reviewed in the New York Times as “a first-rate artist.” I played the American premiere of Elliott Carter’s A 6 Letter Letter. My father called, informing me via my answering machine that he’d hired a private detective to investigate Jinx and that she was indeed a “bad person,” not to be trusted. (So that’s what those strange hang-ups were: my father disconnecting until he reached my machine.) I continued to nap endlessly. I performed the Strauss Oboe Concerto. I dreamed. I traveled to Europe and throughout the United States, performing with orchestras and chamber music groups. I received another letter from my father—he’d never beaten up my sister, it said, and I was, in effect, crazy, delusional, and an enormous pain in the ass. I slept my Hades-like sleep.
Famous
You meet Rick, a keyboard player, at the Broadway show The Secret Garden. He’s a jazz pianist in real life, and you can relate, being a classical player in real life, because all the disparate disciplines of musicians coalesce on Broadway. Now both of you are standing on a rural road in northern New Jersey, at the bottom of the long driveway leading up to jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s house. You’ve been hired to perform Keith Jarrett’s Adagio for Oboe and String Orchestra at Lincoln Center. And you’ve invited Rick along to provide the piano accompaniment as you begin the first preliminary rehearsal with Keith, one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century—the man who played with Miles and virtually every other living icon of the jazz world.
When the word got out at the show that you had been offered this opportunity with Keith, Rick had immediately jumped in to offer to play the orchestral reduction on piano, and you agreed to bring him along. Rick is a fine jazz pianist and a huge fan of Keith Jarrett. Who wouldn’t be? Everyone knows Keith’s famous albums: The Köln Concert, Paris Concert, and Vienna Concert.
Just how superfamous he is, though, really hits home when you drive up to his house. About twenty people are hanging out at the end of the driveway, taking photographs. They can’t even see the house—or Keith, for that matter—but the fans are there. Your heart races a bit. As you drive up the long driveway, the paparazzi follow you for a while and then drop back, knowing the limits.
You walk into the studio, edgy and shy. You’ve not met Keith before. He’s heard your playing on tape and has engaged you based on that alone. Rick is beside himself, eager for the chance to meet and play for his hero. You warm up a bit, and Rick settles in at the piano in Keith’s state-of-the-art recording studio at the back of his house.
The concerto is not difficult technically, and the bulk of the rehearsal is spent on sound, musical gesture, and pacing. At the end of the three hours, Keith relaxes, pleased with what he hears. You breathe a sigh of relief, and Rick gets to spend a few minutes chatting about jazz with his idol.
You perform the New York premiere at Lincoln Center and then at a few other venues, all in preparation for the recording. Manfred Eicher, the founder and head of ECM Records, leaves you alone during the recording sessions, focusing for the most part on how to best capture your sound. The disc gets played frequently on the radio for many years after you record it.
The Letter
THE SEASONS ROUNDED home base. But I was no longer that silent, rigid girl.
“Marcia, it’s your mother calling.”
“Well. It’s about time.”
“You don’t have to be snippy about it.”
“No? How should I be? What would you have me say? Are you kidding me, Mother? You’re a year too late, and I just don’t understand!”
Every single day for a year might have been the day—when I could take back the truth of my words, reset the clocks, and put my world in reverse gear. In short, apologize to her. That was my secret intention: to get her back any way I could. But on the 365th day, she pushed me off the tracks she built. The teakettle stopper busted out, and my rage boiled over, scalding my shaking hands as I held the phone receiver a few inches from my mouth. I screeched into the mouthpiece and even surprised myself with my fury. It was as if the words sat right at my throat, ready to be gagged up, coughed out—encouraged by the slightest microscopic spec of the dust of truth that blew my way.
Silence.
“Mother?”
“Honey. I’m calling you now.”
“Yeah, well. This is just unacceptable. All year I waited for you to call me. You hung up on me. You turned your back on me. Again! And I got those crazy letters from Father. Those poisonous letters. That coward.”
“What letters? I don’t know what you’re talking about. But it doesn’t matter, all of that. Can’t we just move on from this? That’s why I’m calling, honey. Let’s just start fresh.”
“No way. No. You can’t just dust it up as if nothing happened. Not this time. We need help, Mother. I want to get into mediation or therapy with you.…Just you and me. We could do an intensive weekend thing. You don’t have to lift a finger. I’ll make all the arrangements. I’ll even come to you.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit drastic? We really don’t need to dredge up the past. There’s nothing to be gained by that, honey. It accomplishes nothing. Don’t you see that? Let’s just get past this.”
“It’s what I need, Mother. Don’t you see that?”
She raised the specter, her age-old concern:
“But therapy will cost a fortune. It can be very expensive—hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars. We can’t afford that.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“Please, honey. Be serious. You can’t afford that.”
“I am serious, and you have no idea how much money I have. I’m just saying that you can’t refuse because of the expense. That will not be the reason to refuse me. Us.”
I hesitated a bit, and for a second all I wanted to do was hit the bed hard. We were deep into her money territory, and I knew it was all over.
Now, sitting on the edge of my bed, I stared at my feet. My toes curled up and pointed into each other—pigeon-toed, like a four-year-old girl. Feeling my shoulders slump, I was unsure if I was four or eighty-four. She was so powerful—and all because she simply held herself back. All the information I sought about her in yearbooks never told me what I really wanted to know. All her secrets, and was I ever, just once, part of them?
“Mom. Please. I’m begging you to do this for me. I’m on my knees. You won’t be sorry; I’ll make it all fine. But we need a chance to work it out with a professional. We can’t do this on our own. Can’t you see that? Please. Ju
st give it a chance. Please.”
“I don’t know.…I feel like you’re going to attack me, and I won’t be able to get away.”
“Okay. Okay. I understand that. But I won’t, I promise. And you can leave any time you want. I’ll tell the therapist that you can walk out at any time. I’ll set it up, and if you spend five minutes in the session and walk out, I promise that will be okay. But you won’t regret it. I promise. I’ll make it good for you. I’ll make sure that you’re protected.”
She was silent, and for a few seconds I thought she’d hung up on me.
“Mother?”
“I’m here.”
Ah. I’d played it wrong, once again. Raw and lost, I was so small.
“Please…Mother…won’t you do this for me? I’m really begging you.…”
My voice trailed off. My hoarse pleading and whimpering sounded like those of a wounded dog in the middle of the road, baying for a truck to come and finish her off.
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“Okay. But when will you give me your answer?”
“I don’t know. Just let me think about it for a while.”
A week later I received a note card from her. Van Gogh’s The Bedroom.
Dear Marcia—
I cannot do this for you.
Mother
I’d sung a song for my mother. I shrieked that melody, using the full force of my training to compel her to sing back. I used my diaphragm the way Adelweird taught me to, projecting my sound with my very best breath of air. My song was repeated in a billion variations for those ten minutes I had to convince her to love me; to come and take a chance with me; to finally try to fix things. For those ten minutes, as I flopped back and forth through all the keys of Western music and in every polyrhythm known to the greatest of drummers, I saw that the power of my talent was inadequate; that my very essence was of no consequence. I might as well have been deaf and dumb and blind. Because I did not seem to matter to my mother.
That song would float in the air for seven more years. I heard it echoing in the distance as I counted the anniversaries and waited for some antiphonal response. My mother had no song for me.
Kirsten sang:
In the wafting Universe of the World-Breath—
drown.
Grass
You lie on your back. Tufts of green grass scratch your neck as you look up into the cloudy sky. A few helicopters circle Yankee Stadium as twenty thousand adoring Korean fans sway back and forth in perfect unison, singing the classic American song “You Are My Sunshine” nonstop for five straight hours. Since 6:00 a.m., for eight hours now, they’ve been waiting for their True Father, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. We musicians have long since left the orchestra platform and are lounging all over the field, some in the outfield, some at home plate. When you head into the dugout from time to time to use the facilities, you find young girls lined up in the corridors sobbing uncontrollably. They were hoping their True Father would arrive in one of the helicopters. He does not.
They feed you, as one of the musicians, a sandwich and a soda, but the twenty thousand worshippers have eaten nothing. You offer an orange to one small girl, who just shakes her head rapidly while she rocks back and forth in some kind of self-comforting titration. These girls—perfectly made up, neatly dressed, wildly obedient, and crying for their True Father, who never appears. Are all parents simply a fantasy? All seems lost.
Suddenly they call the job, and you load into the orchestra bus, which takes you back to Carroll Studios, on West 41st Street. You never played a note of the carefully rehearsed concert, but your heart aches as if you had just heard a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. Twenty thousand souls just died, including the small girl you spoke to, whose tears stay with you for many weeks. Such heartfelt yet unrequited devotion is something you know about.
Road Trip
THE CAR WINDOW was cracked open. The breeze felt good, bracing; but it was beginning to rain—just a mist on my face. Sitting in the backseat of a car was preferable to the musicians’ bus. Buses make me queasy, so I jumped at the chance to get in a car with a few of my colleagues. Traveling south on the Taconic State Parkway, after an Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall near Albany, New York, I settled in for the postconcert four-hour ride home. We’d stopped off at a Wawa to get doughnuts and sodas. I would reach my apartment sometime around 3 a.m.
The Troy music hall has acoustics on par with Carnegie Hall and has been for years an esteemed venue for classical music recordings, not to mention concerts. Orpheus would repeat this same concert at Carnegie Hall in a week. During this performance set, I had been subbing for the brilliant oboist whom I sat next to on my very first union job, many years ago.
The misty rain suddenly turned to drops, and I rolled up the window. Now, with the car quiet, I listened to my front-seat colleagues chatting about their kids.
“He’s very good at engineering principles, apparently. At least that’s what his science teacher tells us. God, I can’t even put Legos together.…I have no idea where he gets the knack. Some ancient dinosaur gene, no doubt. And certainly on my husband’s side.”
“I know. It’s like a miracle—they have talents and interests that wouldn’t occur to you, and then all of a sudden they start talking about careers and what they want to do with their lives. So different from when we were young. All we wanted to do was play music.”
“Marcia, are there any doughnuts left?”
“Sure—powdered sugar? Kind of messy.”
“Fine.”
I passed the napkin-wrapped doughnut into the front seat. The rain lightened up, and I cracked the window again. No one was on the highway, and as we whizzed by, I noticed bright red deer eyes on the side of the road, blurred like time-lapsed beacons. My head lolled on the half-open window glass. I was engrossed in their far-flung topics—moms curious about their children; mothers considering deep love as if from a distance.
“My mother thinks I should enroll him in some kind of advanced class for science. But it’s not just science—he likes to look inside of stuff. Last week he took my sewing machine apart and then put it back together, not a screw left over. I didn’t even notice it until I saw that the dust around the machine had been disturbed. And then I saw that the machine was backwards on the table—then he fessed up.”
“Marcia, you sounded great tonight, by the way.”
“Yeah, you really did. So much great stuff for you in the Schoenberg.”
“Thanks.”
We’d performed the Kammersymphonie no. 1, op. 9, that evening.
“But my mother’s really pushing this gifted thing. Not too sure how I feel about it. What about a balance? I don’t want him to get locked into anything at this age, because you never know what might surface later. God, honestly? I just pray that he’s happy.”
“Happy sounds simple enough. Your mother sounds so involved, though. I mean, is she overbearing and intrusive?”
“No, not at all. And I need it because I really feel clueless. I don’t know what I’d do without her, especially now that my son is showing these signs of real talent. But you’re right, she does have the rag in the mouth about it. Not in a bad way: it’s just that she’s so damned proud of him. She says her grandfather was a civil engineer.…So maybe the genes are on both sides and skipped a few generations. He loves her to bits, too. She sings Mozart arias to him at bedtime.”
“That’s so sweet! That gene didn’t skip!”
“I don’t know—it’s kind of embarrassing. But I guess it could be worse.…”
The misty rain mixed with the salt from my silent tears. It could, indeed, be much worse.
The Taconic always seemed pitch dark late at night, more than other highways. We’d not seen cars driving in the other direction for a while, so my friend switched on the high beams. Now we could easily see the deer, whole families chowing down in the dark until the headlights startled them. The chatter in the front seat d
ied down—this lull was somehow welcomed. My friend turned on the radio, finding a classical station after some static-filled dialing. We happened upon the last five minutes of Siegfried Idyll. For the love of a child.
Two hundred miles east, a parallel highway ran southward. My mother was somewhere over in that direction—to my left. We lived hundreds of miles apart, but still next to the same ocean, still in the same time zone. If she were to come to me, I knew just how it might work.…
She would begin on I-95 at Hampton Falls, near Stratham, New Hampshire, where she and my father lived. Traveling south, my mother would have the option of turning right prematurely onto I-495 toward Haverhill and Lowell, Massachusetts. This would, in effect, cut off a large portion of I-95, to save travel time as she rounded Boston, heading to all points south. But I gave due respect to my mother and her aversions and particular eccentricities. An eventual left-hand turn in order to get back onto I-95 was not possible.
The National Highway System would be kind to my mother as she traveled down the East Coast. Stretching her legs in front of her, her lovely knees emerging from just below the hem of her shirtwaist dress, she would press down on the accelerator. Southward now—through Massachusetts and into Connecticut toward Danbury.
A few months before, I’d played a pops concert in Danbury, Connecticut, at an outdoor venue a few miles off I-95. We were backing up the folk-pop singer Judy Collins. We’d had a truly miserable afternoon rehearsal, with the late setting sun blazing directly into our eyes and the temperature soaring into the nineties; the humidity must have topped off at a sopping 100 percent. The stage, cantilevered over a man-made pond, begat swarms of bugs, both biting and benign. Valiantly trying to make music, we smacked a mosquito every ten notes or so. Judy hung on like a pro.
The Skin Above My Knee Page 16